"Strange the Dreamer", A Festival of Magic

Laini Taylor's duology, "Strange the Dreamer" and "Muse of Nightmares" tore my heart out, chopped it into little pieces and then placed it back in my chest remade a bit softer and gentler than before.

Do you know that feeling you get when you discover a book that feels like it has touched your life, whose characters will stay with you for years, long after so many other stories you read would have faded into oblivion? This duology sat in my kindle for months while I was busy reading other things and when I finally came to it all I could think of was - how did I not read this sooner?

So where do I start telling you what exactly this book has meant for me?

“Strange the Dreamer” is rated as YA and both main characters are very young - she 17, he 21. Perhaps that was what kept me away from it for a long time - I am drawn to books whose characters are mature and dealing with mid-life challenges, rather than coming-of-age stories. But Strange the Dreamer holds lead characters who are timeless. They deal with some of the most profound dilemmas of humanity and do so with maturity way beyond their years.

Laini Taylor’s writing is like honey. I cannot recall reading another book where every word seemed crafted to perfection, not a breath wasted, the narration flowing so smoothly that I found myself completely sucked into the story and picturing every detail with a vividness that I have rarely experienced - and that’s saying a lot given I’m a powerfully visual reader. And her metaphors, her punchlines! I found myself returning to passages for the sheer pleasure of re-reading a particularly delicious and shockingly creative play on words that made me not just see, but deeply feel what was happening. I felt I was reading with my soul.

It will be very hard to imagine what I’m trying to describe here unless you actually read it, but here’s a taste. Here’s one of my favourite lines in the book, which felt like the perfect summary of the state of the world:

“You think good people can’t hate?” she asked. “You think good people don’t kill?”[...}”Good people do all the things bad people do, Lazlo. It’s just that when they do them, they call it justice.”

And this is the kind of metaphor that made me stop and close my eyes, letting in swirl inside me for a while, just like when you let a piece of chocolate melt on your tongue, unrushed:

“Sometimes a moment is so remarkable that it carves out a space in time and spins there, while the world rushes on around it. This was one such.”

Have you lived moments so remarkable that they carved out a space in your time and spun there? I sure have, and this is one of the many moments when this book gave me pause, making me contemplate my life and my place in the universe.

And this:

“It might have been brief, but so much of a kiss - a first kiss especially - is the moment before your lips touch, and before your eyes close, when you’re filled with the sight of each other, and with the compulsion, the pull, and it’s like...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.”

I just wish everyone’s first kiss could be like that. I wish all our kids sought someone who could give them this kind of first kiss. It made me wonder how might a book such as this, where first love is portrayed like the most miraculous thing in the world (which it should be, but not always is), inspire young people to look for this kind of experience. To pause, to connect, to, as my beloved grandmother used to tell me when I was young “look for someone who truly deserves a piece of your heart”.

Lazlo strange is one of the most beautifully human characters I’ve encountered, without being ‘too good’ in that sweet, syrupy, perfectly beautiful way that makes male main characters a caricature insead of a man. He’s been traumatised but not hardened, his nose is crooked from having been broken by, of all things … a book of stories and he is obsessively pursuing his sole childhood dream: finding the long-lost city of Weep. Lazlo is a librarian and in his own way a scholar, but one who stubbornly believes in magic, paying attention to the little signs, the little nudges from the deeper world that are missed by everybody else.

It might be because I’ve read this book at a time in my life when my inner scholar is learning to befriend my inner dreamer, or perhaps because I’m a deep introvert who doesn’t mind spending loads of time alone reading, but there was something deep about Lazlo’s story that spoke to me. It might have been the image of him walking through the library reading, oblivious to the world around him, or that of the huge book of stories that fell down and broke his nose or perhaps this:

“He read while he walked. He read while he ate. The other librarians suspected he somehow read while he slept, or perhaps didn’t sleep at all.”

Lazlo Strange was my kind of guy. And then there is Sarai. A blue girl born out of tragedy, raised to hate and punish those who had stolen her life away and who, over years, discovered compassion for the perpetrators, who turned out to be victims just perhaps a bit more than they were villains.

If Sarai could turn into a substance people could take, one that held all the essence of the darkness she’d experienced and the hard long road to understanding, I really believe we could stop all the wars everywhere and instantly make the world a better place. But that, of course, is fantasy. To become Sarai we need our own big dose of suffering and even then, we need to be lucky enough (or wise enough, or loved enough) for that suffering to not harden us and turn us into weapons, but soften us and instead turn us into balms for other people’s wounds.

I hope by now I’ve convinced you to give this book a try, but if you’re still debating, here’s my final argument. Laini Taylor shared in an interview that she got tired of villains and heroes and wanted to write a book where every character was both. Honestly I’ve never read a book that managed to achieve that aspiration to the degree that this one has. In “Strange the Dreamer” every character, even the peripheral ones, is multi-layered.

The villains do good things and the good guys do horrible things. They love and fail, hate and crumble, rise and learn to love again. Lazlo and Sarai’s love story is an embodiment of this juxtaposition of trauma and innocence, all against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful fantasy cities in the world.

I’ve become a bit obsessed with Laini Taylor’s craft, so I subscribed to her Patreon and already learning many useful things that will hopefully make my own travail of birthing my book a bit less (or at least more usefully) painful. But more about that birthing process in the next post. In the meantime, please leave a comment here and tell me - did you read this book? If yes, what touched you most. What other fantasy books have rocked your world in the way this one has mine?

I’ve got a long pipeline of readings I’ve been dreaming of writing about, so stay tuned for more. And if you know other fantasy book nerds who might love to hang out here, send them this way!

Why subscribe?

Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives. I’ll write infrequently, when inspiration strikes me. It might be writing about writing. Writing about learning how to write. Writing about books I love (all fantasy here, the nerdy/academic stuff you can find on Alis’ substack). Writing about the unravelling that comes with doing someting for the very first time in your mid-life and relishing every moment of it, even the hard ones! Join me and let’s see where it leads us!

Stay up-to-date

Never miss an update—every new post is sent directly to your email inbox. For a spam-free, ad-free reading experience, plus audio and community features, get the Substack app.

Join the crew

Be part of a community of people who share your interests. Participate in the comments section, or support this work with a subscription.

To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.