Strange the Dreamer

by Laini Taylor

Strange the Dreamer has some of the best world building I’ve ever read. What I loved about this book was the amount of detail Taylor put into the characters. They felt so real and so beautifully flawed.When I read this book, I actually listened to the audio book on Audible. The narrator for this book was Steve West and he did a fantastic job with this. He gave each character their own unique voice and really made me believe it.

Lazlo Strange is an orphan boy with a rough childhood. He’s a child of a war torn country who was left with a group of monks with all the other war orphans of the time. Having the last name of Strange means you belong to no family, and everyone knows it. Lazlo endures the severe abuse at the hands of the monks for years before he finally has a chance to escape.

By sheer luck he stows away inside the depths of a library and is forgotten by the monks who sent him there. He grows up in the library, taking the job of junior librarian as seriously as one should. As a child, his dreams were of an ancient city, long forgotten by the people of the library. His desires to find the city were all fantasy, until one day a band of myths come looking for brilliant minds to go with them to the very city Lazlo dreams of finding.

Nothing in his life could have prepared them for the mysteries waiting for them in the city of Weep. And Lazlo had no way of knowing that the biggest mystery of all was waiting just for him. 

(Book Summary from Amazon)

This story is one filled with grief, love, and dreams. The landscape feels ever changing and incredibly beautiful. The characters are dimensional and rough. They don’t fit into a black and white box. They’re gray and growing. The kids are kids. They care about the things that kids care about. They don’t have that teen TV show problem of a 30 year old cast as a high school student, which can sometimes be a problem in young adult novels.

This isn’t a young adult novel to be read by younger kids. There are sexual elements throughout the book that might not be suitable for younger audiences. However, I thought these scenes were accurately portrayed and tastefully done. These are teenagers figuring out sex for the first time. It’s clumsy and awkward. I felt Taylor did an outstanding job of portraying this element of being an almost adult.

The only thing I had a hard time with in the beginning of this novel was how wordy the prose is. Everything seemed to come across as a metaphor. The world is full of fantasy words and names, which is fine but when it’s combined with wordy exposition, sometimes you can get lost. This is where the audiobook really helped. Having someone else read it to me helped both the wordiness and the names of people and places.

Overall, the story was outstanding. I was blown away by the ruthlessness of the author. There was no shying away from the hard subjects and no backing down when it came down to killing characters or ripping away happiness to spare anyone’s feelings. If the plot needed it, the author did it.

I also want to point out that rarely have I ever read a book that seemed to listen to my thoughts as a reader. No sooner than I thought of something, the narrative inserted the answer. If I couldn’t remember a piece of backstory that was mentioned earlier in the book, the author was able to put the answer right in front of me, without being obvious or repetitive.