Strange The Dreamer by Laini Taylor

On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

When it comes to catching your attention from the first line, no one does it better than Laini.

She says in her book:

“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable,” she pleaded. “Something beautiful and full of monsters.”

This seems to be Laini, talking to herself. Strange the Dreamer is exactly that and more. It is a dream of a book. It is full of wild and improbable fantasies and is utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful and full of unforgettable monsters. 

But the genius of Laini lies in how she blurs the lines between the good and the bad. Some monsters are a nightmare ⸺ horrible and cruel. While the others have layers so deep that they make you question things. They force you to accept the fact that sometimes life happens to you in such a way that you need to turn into a monster to survive.

The book plays deftly with the concept of duality. And then goes ahead and smudges the lines. During my first reading ⸺ yes, I have visited Strange’s world more than once ⸺ I found the book almost overwhelming. I could not contain my feelings. Laini made me yearn to be where Gods and Monsters live side by side. I longed to be in Weep - the city where it all started with a girl’s death.

The Plot:

Strange the Dreamer starts with a death. A hauntingly beautiful girl dies somewhere. And then we are taken to a place where a grey, sickly-looking orphan, a little boy, found life at a monastery. Though he was left at the mercy of a bleak and stark life, Lazlo Strange grows up to be a junior librarian whose saving grace was the books he lived for. 

He is able to delve into the mystery of a story he had once heard as a boy in the monastery.    

A story of the most impossible city whose name gets stolen from the minds of people. Even Lazlo felt the bitter taste of the name that was left in his head in place of the real one. Weep. This is how people remember that beautiful city. The City of Weep.

But Lazlo did not know that the city was coming to him. The dream was soon going to come true. And when he would finally reach the city of his dreams, he would find it filled with all the wonders he had thought of and the un-thought of ⸺ gods and monsters, warriors and weaklings, horror and delight, passionate love and obsessive hate. 

Lazlo finds his fate tied up more intricately than he could imagine with the fate of Weep.

Will Lazlo be its saviour and protect it from the dark shadows the City weeps under? Or will he spell doom by digging its secrets? Read the beautiful prose of Laini and dive into the mysteries of Weep and Lazlo Strange. Yes. You must find the Secret of Weep. More than anything, you must read it for the sheer world-building. 

The Place: 

Oh the world! Ok - first things first - it felt like Asgard to me. Hint of Loki, a smidgen of Thor, the shadow of the All-Father. You will know it when you find the secret of Weep. I just feel that Laini was inspired by the Yggdrasill, in Norse mythology, or the world tree ⸺ a ginormous ash holding the universe in its branches.

She picks up where she left off in her previous series ⸺ The Daughter of Smoke and Bones. Remember the Seraphim Faerers who went on the impossible quest to cut open portals and find other worlds? Explorers, adventurers, sailing the infinite ocean of the Universe weathering all odds.

And so we come to Strange’s world. Almost like Earth, almost. It follows the same rule. Perfect Gods, flawed people. And then the twist happens.

The People:

Strange the Dreamer, the GodSlayer, the Golden GodSon, the Orchid Witch, Feral, Bonfire, the Muse of Nightmares and above all, at least for me, Minya⸺a character chiselled to perfection.  

The characters have power. Each one has their own story to tell. The beauty of the book lies in the fact that it makes you want to pick up the threads of these almost stories and follow them. 

Yes. Each. One. Of. Them.

Lazlo will charm you with his dreams and his faith. Sarai will mark you with her tenacity to be good and her courage to brave odds. Eril-Fane will make you love him and hate him. And Minya will awe you. She is the most beautifully conceived person in the book. 

The little girl with so much hate that she refused to grow up. The girl who stopped you from evanescence…....

Which brings us to the cliffhanger that wraps up Strange the Dreamer. You don’t see it coming and when it does, it blows your mind.

Strange the Dreamer was, undoubtedly, the best YA fantasy book I read in 2017.