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From National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor comes an epic fantasy about a mythic lost city and its dark past. The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around—and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared his dream chose poorly. Since he was just five years old, he's been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the form show more of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he has to seize his chance or lose his dream forever. What happened in Weep two hundred years ago to cut it off from the rest of the world? And who is the blue-skinned goddess who appears in Lazlo's dreams? In this sweeping and breathtaking novel by National Book Award finalist Laini Taylor, author of the New York Times bestselling Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy, the shadow of the past is as real as the ghosts who haunt the citadel of murdered gods. Fall into a mythical world of dread and wonder, moths and nightmares, love and carnage. The answers await in Weep. show lessTags
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Lazlo Strange is an orphan and a library clerk. His propensity for daydreaming has earned him the nickname Strange the Dreamer. As a child he was playing out in an orchard, pretending to be a Tizerkane warrior from the Lost City. At that moment the name of that city was stolen from the minds of everyone in the world. It would forever more be called Weep. When he got older and became a library clerk in the abbey of the Kingdom of Zosma, Strange hunted out and read every book he could find about Weep. One day an envoy arrived from Weep. They were looking for experts with a variety of skills and knowledge that would be willing to travel to Weep to help save the city. Lazlo, having taught himself the language of Weep through his reading, is show more invited to make the journey as a secretary to the leader, Eril-Fane, the Godslayer.
Upon their arrival at Weep the visitors can not help but see that which the people of Weep refer to as "the shadow of our dark time". Floating horizontally in the air above the city of Weep is a gigantic statue made of molten metal in the shape of a man with wings spread. The Citadel of the Mesarthim. Home to the Gods that showed up one day and stole the light from Weep. These Gods treated the people of Weep as servants and breeders. They destroyed all the knowledge the people of Weep had obtained through their history. They stole the name of the city from the world. Eril-Fane slew these Gods. But the Citadel remains, unmovable. The people of Weep are hoping their visitors can solve their problem. What the people of Weep don't know is that the Citadel isn't empty. Four children survived the slaughter. These now teenaged half human, half God children each have their own power. One of them is Sarai, the Muse of Nightmares. She visits the dreams of the people of Weep nightly, and turns them into nightmares.
When Strange the Dreamer and Sarai, the Muse of Nightmares realize that they can communicate with each other in his dreams things become very complicated.
I loved this book. I hated to put it down and I picked it up whenever I had the opportunity. This is a quick read for a 544 page book. The writing pulled me in immediately. The characters are all distinct and interesting. The world building is pretty good -- it's not extensive but gives you enough to want to know more and hopefully more will be coming in the sequel. Recommended. show less
Upon their arrival at Weep the visitors can not help but see that which the people of Weep refer to as "the shadow of our dark time". Floating horizontally in the air above the city of Weep is a gigantic statue made of molten metal in the shape of a man with wings spread. The Citadel of the Mesarthim. Home to the Gods that showed up one day and stole the light from Weep. These Gods treated the people of Weep as servants and breeders. They destroyed all the knowledge the people of Weep had obtained through their history. They stole the name of the city from the world. Eril-Fane slew these Gods. But the Citadel remains, unmovable. The people of Weep are hoping their visitors can solve their problem. What the people of Weep don't know is that the Citadel isn't empty. Four children survived the slaughter. These now teenaged half human, half God children each have their own power. One of them is Sarai, the Muse of Nightmares. She visits the dreams of the people of Weep nightly, and turns them into nightmares.
When Strange the Dreamer and Sarai, the Muse of Nightmares realize that they can communicate with each other in his dreams things become very complicated.
I loved this book. I hated to put it down and I picked it up whenever I had the opportunity. This is a quick read for a 544 page book. The writing pulled me in immediately. The characters are all distinct and interesting. The world building is pretty good -- it's not extensive but gives you enough to want to know more and hopefully more will be coming in the sequel. Recommended. show less
I am sadly conflicted on this book. In some ways I *adored* it. A fascinating magic system, compelling world-building, some great characters with believable motivation and development. On the other hand, the strain of sexuality made me uncomfy. I am sure that most of this is very much a me issue wrt to where I am and what I'm wrestling with personally. There was, however, a strong strain of inevitability and heteronormativity about it that never sat well, above and beyond my own kneejerk reactions.
All that being said, I will most likely read the sequel bc this book ended on such a fantastic cliff-hanger. I won't be surprised if I am ruminating on Strange the Dreamer for a bit.
All that being said, I will most likely read the sequel bc this book ended on such a fantastic cliff-hanger. I won't be surprised if I am ruminating on Strange the Dreamer for a bit.
I enjoyed this deconstruction of the typical hero’s story. There are more colors painted on this canvas than what you usually see. This is one of the few plot-driven stories that I have enjoyed.
First, it’s dark and complicated with the paradox of love and hate. Everything is messy and complex, the cast of characters included. Do the ends justify the means? When we idolize people what parts do we fail to see? How can one-sided thinking create huge blind spots?
The story begins slowly with Lazlo’s childhood and a haughty prince, but it’s worth holding onto until you can get to the meat of the story. I was surprised this wasn’t an Adult Fantasy with some of its implications and sexual content. Oh, and Minya? As my father would show more say, “That one’s a pistol.”
Overall, this was something different for me, and I had a great reading experience. It was DREAMY. show less
First, it’s dark and complicated with the paradox of love and hate. Everything is messy and complex, the cast of characters included. Do the ends justify the means? When we idolize people what parts do we fail to see? How can one-sided thinking create huge blind spots?
The story begins slowly with Lazlo’s childhood and a haughty prince, but it’s worth holding onto until you can get to the meat of the story. I was surprised this wasn’t an Adult Fantasy with some of its implications and sexual content. Oh, and Minya? As my father would show more say, “That one’s a pistol.”
Overall, this was something different for me, and I had a great reading experience. It was DREAMY. show less
Lazlo Strange is an orphan who nearly became a monk but was rescued into a life as a librarian by a batch of slightly-off fish, and he has no idea where he came from or who is parents may have been. He spends his days in the dusty parts of the library, reading all he can on the Unseen City, a place no one can to get to and the name of which no one can quite remember. It all seems like fairy tales and myths until the day that the people of that city appear looking for scholars to follow them home. Lazlo is an unlikely candidate, as he's just a librarian, but he strikes their leader - known as The Godslayer - as, well, striking, and he's invited along. What he finds in that forgotten city is beyond all his imaginings, and the most show more surprising thing among them, a beautiful girl, who happens to be blue.
Gah. I can't do this one justice in a summary without giving stuff away (or probably even if I did give stuff away). I both loved it (it's beautifully written; the story is amazing and inventive; the characters fascinating and wonderful and sharp) and hated it (and loved hating it, both for reasons I can't indicate here). It's one of those books with certain pages that make you (or maybe it's just me) race to read to the bottom all while trying very hard not to glance down at the shocking spoiler you *know* is probably down there somewhere. So, yep, it's a good 'un, even if it did make me furiously frustrated. show less
Gah. I can't do this one justice in a summary without giving stuff away (or probably even if I did give stuff away). I both loved it (it's beautifully written; the story is amazing and inventive; the characters fascinating and wonderful and sharp) and hated it (and loved hating it, both for reasons I can't indicate here). It's one of those books with certain pages that make you (or maybe it's just me) race to read to the bottom all while trying very hard not to glance down at the shocking spoiler you *know* is probably down there somewhere. So, yep, it's a good 'un, even if it did make me furiously frustrated. show less
Ooh I really wanted to love this so much more than I did! As always, ms Taylor is a master of beautifully written imagery and amazingly unforgettable characters. This had me hooked from page one and held me captive only to make me cringe at the end. I found the the back story to be slightly nauseating as well. Clearly this is the start of another series, but sometimes I just want a book that is a great stand alone story. sigh...
I haven't been this impressed by an author's imagination and world building since reading my first Harry Potter. Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor is a Young Adult fantasy novel and not what I typically read. However, when I read that the main character Lazlo Strange, a war orphan with an active imagination comes to work in a great library after being raised in a monastery by monks, I was keen to pick this up.
Strange was the surname given to all foundlings in the Kingdom and he was given to the monastery as a baby during war time. Strange grew up fascinated by stories and obsessed with the mysteries of the lost city of Weep.
At the age of 13, Strange was asked to deliver some manuscripts to the Great Library of Zosma but never went show more back. Strange felt instantly at home amongst the manuscripts and scrolls and was taken on as an apprentice. The descriptions of the Great Library of Zosma were incredible and I longed to walk through the Pavilion of Thought and scan the shelves. Imagine the Citadel in Game of Thrones and you can't go wrong.
"The Great Library was no mere place to keep books. It was a walled city for poets and astronomers and every shade of thinker in between." Page 14
"Shelves rose forty feet under an astonishing painted ceiling, and the spines of books glowed in jewel-toned leather, their gold leaf shining in the glavelight like animal eyes." Page 15
The writing is atmospheric and transported me from the first page, here's the description of a kiss from Page 421:
"A first kiss… [it’s like]… finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one - like… spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That’s what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It’s a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane."
Strange the Dreamer is overflowing with the most amazing writing that made me feel as though I were immersed inside a fairytale. Full of magic, gods, alchemists, scholars, myths and legends, Laini Taylor swept me so far away that I felt I wasn't reading at all. I was very much part of Lazlo's world and accompanying him on his adventures.
Strange the Dreamer is the first in a duology and an absolute certainty for inclusion in my Top 5 Books of 2019. The best part? I have the sequel Muse of Nightmares on my shelves ready to be enjoyed.
Highly recommended! show less
Strange was the surname given to all foundlings in the Kingdom and he was given to the monastery as a baby during war time. Strange grew up fascinated by stories and obsessed with the mysteries of the lost city of Weep.
At the age of 13, Strange was asked to deliver some manuscripts to the Great Library of Zosma but never went show more back. Strange felt instantly at home amongst the manuscripts and scrolls and was taken on as an apprentice. The descriptions of the Great Library of Zosma were incredible and I longed to walk through the Pavilion of Thought and scan the shelves. Imagine the Citadel in Game of Thrones and you can't go wrong.
"The Great Library was no mere place to keep books. It was a walled city for poets and astronomers and every shade of thinker in between." Page 14
"Shelves rose forty feet under an astonishing painted ceiling, and the spines of books glowed in jewel-toned leather, their gold leaf shining in the glavelight like animal eyes." Page 15
The writing is atmospheric and transported me from the first page, here's the description of a kiss from Page 421:
"A first kiss… [it’s like]… finding a book inside another book. A small treasure of a book hidden inside a big common one - like… spells printed on dragonfly wings, discovered tucked inside a cookery book, right between the recipes for cabbages and corn. That’s what a kiss is like, he thought, no matter how brief: It’s a tiny, magical story, and a miraculous interruption of the mundane."
Strange the Dreamer is overflowing with the most amazing writing that made me feel as though I were immersed inside a fairytale. Full of magic, gods, alchemists, scholars, myths and legends, Laini Taylor swept me so far away that I felt I wasn't reading at all. I was very much part of Lazlo's world and accompanying him on his adventures.
Strange the Dreamer is the first in a duology and an absolute certainty for inclusion in my Top 5 Books of 2019. The best part? I have the sequel Muse of Nightmares on my shelves ready to be enjoyed.
Highly recommended! show less
“You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
“Beautiful and full of monsters?"
“All the best stories are.”
4.5 stars
Laini Taylor, you have done it again. You get to keep your much-deserved place as my second favorite author (you can't beat Pat Rothfuss, sorry). You earned it immediately after I finished the Daughter of Smoke & Bone trilogy last year, but now it's definitely yours to keep. You get to keep it because your beautiful imagination just keeps blowing my mind.
I will repeat what I already repeated on all three of my reviews of the DOSAB books: Laini's writing is just GORGEOUS (yes, with capital letters and in bold). I do not get tired of saying show more it. Her writing has somehow found the perfect place between poetic and cheesy, never becoming tedious. She does tend to mention the same feelings or events more than once or twice but wording them differently, but this is actually part of the charm. She has a beautiful way of portraying raw emotions (not just love, but cruelty, grief) and painting lovely or devastating pictures.
This book is just... well, for a lack of a better word, dreamy. Which is really a fantastic accomplishment, considering the whole thing revolves around dreams. It is one thing to write about dreaming; it is a completely different thing to make your writing feel like dreaming. And it did, at least for me. The whole book feels otherworldly, ethereal, like anything is possible. It sparked up my imagination in surprising ways. I'm writing a fantasy novel myself right now, and reading this book actually inspired me to write; it lit up my senses and woke up my imagination. Almost every time I put this book down, I went to my own novel to write because the magic of Strange the Dreamer was extremely contagious and I did not want to lose a second of the inspiration it brought me.
Laini has a way of showing color that I just adore. I love that she relies a lot on colors for the story itself. I noticed it in DOSAB, but it was much more noticable in this one. Already in the cover of the book you can tell how important colors are in this story, just look at that contrast between gold and blue. Colors are used throughout the entire novel to show the difference between the characters, their lives, their pasts, and also to simply paint a beautiful picture and then paint that same picture without the bright colors that made it so beautiful. Floating in Lazlo's colorful dreams and then coming back to the real version of the place... the mere difference in color was striking.
What Laini also does very well (and which seems to be a theme she enjoys navigating, since it's also present in the DOSAB books) is the gray area. Neither is the "good guy" completely good, nor is the "bad guy" entirely bad. They both have their valid reasons to do what they do, and they both have traits of the other in them. No one is neither perfectly righteous nor completely evil. And this is really the most interesting type of characters, because they're the realistic and three-dimensional kind; the kind every reader looks for and hardly ever finds in YA literature. Nothing and no one in life is ever perfect, and Laini seems to understand this very clearly.
Another theme she seems to have a particular interest in is
Another praise I have for Laini is that she somehow makes insta-love seem believable. You know it's insta-love when you're reading it, but it is presented so subtly (and so beautifully) that not only does it not bother you, but it also feels plausible, and you enjoy it
But, despite all the praising, I did rate this book 4.5, not 5 full stars. I was hesitating on whether to round it up or down. I put it at 5 in the end because I did enjoy every page of the book, but objectively maybe it's closer to 4 stars than to 5. Mainly because I keep comparing it to DOSAB, which captivated me completely; maybe if I had read this one first I would've been far more thrilled.
My three reasons for rating it 4.5:
1. I was expecting to be surprised more. Not surprised like shocked, but like unable to guess what'll happen next. I was never able to guess in DOSAB, and I found that so enticing. In Strange the Dreamer, I pretty much guessed everything as the story went on except for one small thing:
2. Sometimes the romantic moments between Lazlo and Sarai almost annoyed me because it was just too sweet. So many pages of passionate kissing made it tiresome, and I thought their banter was pretty awkward at times, and rather forced. I enjoyed their relationship, but I wish it had been... how to say it... more subtle, I guess.
3. The cliffhanger. I was expecting it because every book of DOSAB also ends in cliffhanger and it's clear it's a tool Laini enjoys using, but it still bothers me.
But, honestly, this book is dreamy and wonderful, and Laini's imagination for fantasy knows no bounds. It's hard to imagine exactly what direction the story is going to take from now on, given how this book ended.
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Author Information
33+ Works 23,600 Members
Laini Taylor was born in Chico, California in 1971. She received a degree in English from UC Berkeley in 1994. She also studied illustration at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Before becoming a full-time author, she worked as a travel book editor, a bookseller, a waitress, and an illustrator/designer. Her works include Blackbringer, show more Silksinger, Lips Touch: Three Times, and the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series. In 2014 her title Dreams of Gods and Monsters made The New York Times Best seller list. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Laini Taylor is a LibraryThing Author, an author who lists their personal library on LibraryThing.
DanielaLombard is also the author Laini Taylor.
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Awards
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Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Strange the Dreamer
- Original title
- Strange the Dreamer
- Original publication date
- 2016-09
- People/Characters
- Lazlo Strange; Sarai
- Important places
- Ween
- Dedication
- For Alexandra, unique in the world
- First words
- On the second Sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.
- Quotations
- “You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters."
“Beautiful and full of monsters?"
“All the best stories are.”
It was impossible, of course. But when did that ever stop any dreamer from dreaming.
There was a man who loved the moon, but whenever he tried to embrace her, she broke into a thousand pieces and left him drenched, with empty arms.
He looked him right in the eyes and saw a man who was great and good and human, who had done extraordinary things and terrible things and been broken and reassembled as a shell, only then to do the bravest thing of all: He ha... (show all)d kept on living, though there are easier paths to take. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)Because this story was not over yet.
- Blurbers
- Bardugo, Leigh; Chokshi, Roshani
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 813.6
- Canonical LCC
- PZ7.T214826
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- Members
- 4,111
- Popularity
- 3,757
- Reviews
- 146
- Rating
- (4.19)
- Languages
- 11 — Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Spanish, Portuguese (Portugal)
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 49
- ASINs
- 8