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Strange the Dreamer
624 pages
A lush, dreamlike plunge into a mythic city where gods, ghosts, and star-crossed lovers collide.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like stepping into a vivid, melancholic dream. The pacing is steady and deliberate, allowing the lush, poetic prose to wrap around you like a spell. It is a story steeped in wonder and tragedy, balancing the quiet, earnest yearning of a bookish protagonist with the sweeping, mythic stakes of a lost city haunted by murdered gods. The atmosphere is thick with ethereal magic, blue-skinned muses, and golden moths, creating a mood that is both deeply romantic and tinged with dread. It will utterly delight readers who read fantasy for the atmosphere and the prose, those who want to be swept away by star-crossed love and the heavy, haunting legacy of the past.
- Mood
- dreamy
- wonder-struck
- ethereal
- haunting
- Tone
- lyrical
- earnest
- mythic
- romantic
- melancholic
- Pace
- steady
- Themes
- the power of imagination · legacy of trauma · star-crossed romance · burden of the past · finding belonging
- The writing
- Lush, poetic, and dripping with sensory metaphors that make the world feel tangible and magical.
- The arc
- Begins with quiet, bookish yearning and swells into a sweeping, tragic romance fraught with world-shattering revelations.
- Who it's for
- Readers who crave deeply atmospheric, character-driven fantasies where the prose is as enchanting as the magic system.
Content notes
- violence
- grief
- trauma
- child death (backstory)
About the book
The dream chooses the dreamer, not the other way around–and Lazlo Strange, war orphan and junior librarian, has always feared that his dream chose poorly. Since he was five years old, he’s been obsessed with the mythic lost city of Weep, but it would take someone braver than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the form 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 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.
Description from Open Library.
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