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Reviewed by:
  • Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor
  • Karen Coats
Taylor, Laini Strange the Dreamer. Little, 2017 [544p]
Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-316-34168-4 $18.99
E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-316-34164-6 $10.99
Reviewed from galleys         R* Gr. 7-10

As an orphan, Lazlo Strange escapes his restrictive life in a monastery with an apprenticeship at the Great Library of Zosma. Here he finds his first real home, and he researches the stories told him by an elderly monk of a city lost to the world some two hundred years ago. While scholars scoff at his interest, Lazlo writes his own history of the city of Weep, learning its language and finding in its lore the secret of alchemy. When a delegation from Weep seeks people who might help solve a problem that plagues the city, Lazlo eagerly volunteers, and he’s accepted by the leader, Eril-Fane, as secretary and storyteller. What Lazlo discovers is a beautiful demigoddess named Sarai who visits the city’s people in their sleep, torturing them with nightmares. Lazlo and Sarai meet in dreams and fall in blissful love; fans of Taylor will know not to trust this development, and indeed, the moment of Lazlo’s triumph is also the moment that wrecks him and portends more dread to come in the sequel. The luxurious prose and complex world building invites and rewards slow reading, with close attention to the details that hint that Lazlo is no ordinary orphan. Sarai and the few other godspawn who escaped the carnage in a recent slaughter of gods and goddesses are heartbreaking in their isolation and longing, while the humans have equal right to be aggrieved. Here readers will find characters to love and ones to hate and, ultimately, a world to be willingly lost in.

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