Strange the Dreamer Book Review: The Most Beautiful Prose I've Read in YA Fantasy

Rating: ★★★★★

"Strange the Dreamer" Book Review:

Lazlo Strange is a librarian who dreams of a lost city whose name was stolen from the minds of everyone who ever knew it. He calls it Weep, because that's all anyone can say when they try to remember. And from that single image — a city-shaped hole in the world's memory — Laini Taylor builds something breathtaking.

Taylor is a prose stylist on another level. Every sentence in this book is considered, polished, and deliberately beautiful without tipping into preciousness. She writes about dreams the way Morgenstern writes about magic — as something tangible, architectural, and real. When Lazlo joins an expedition to the lost city, Taylor describes the approach with the wonder of someone who has been dreaming about a place for their entire life and is finally seeing it, and that wonder is infectious.

Above Weep floats a massive citadel made of mesarthium, an impossible blue metal. The citadel was home to the Mesarthim — godlike beings who enslaved the city for generations before being killed. But their children survived. Sarai, called the Muse of Nightmares, is a blue-skinned godspawn who can enter people's dreams, and she has been sending nightmares to the citizens below to keep herself and the other godspawn safe. When she enters Lazlo's dreams, she finds something she didn't expect: a mind that dreams in beauty rather than fear.

The love story between Lazlo and Sarai is one of the most tender and imaginative I've encountered. They fall in love inside dreams, building worlds for each other the way Celia and Marco build tents in The Night Circus. Taylor writes their connection with a reverence that earns the fairy-tale register.

Steve West narrates with warmth and a sense of wonder that matches Taylor's prose perfectly.

Five stars. The ending is a cliffhanger that will make you need the sequel immediately. The sequel is Muse of Nightmares, and it's also excellent.

If You Liked Strange the Dreamer, Try:

• The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern — Two magicians building impossible things for each other as declarations of love. Same aesthetic, same wonder.

• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern — Stories within stories within stories, all connected by doors between worlds and the people brave enough to open them.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

If you enjoyed this book review, check out The Stardust Pirates — a story about people who travel impossible distances only to discover the thing they were looking for was the crew they built along the way. Found family at its most literal and most earned. Learn More: The Stardust Pirates

The Stardust Pirates by Luke Stoffel