Karou lives in two worlds. In one she is an art student living in Prague, set apart by her blue hair and tattoos. In the other she works with the chimaera, creatures that are a cross between different animals and sometimes human. For Brimstone, the chimaera who raised her, she collects teeth. These are turned into wishes, and other powerful magic, but she does not know their main use. There are doorways to this other world all over Earth, and this makes her teeth gathering […]
This book ensorcelled me, but I want to talk about the end.
This is going to be a short review. Mostly because I don’t know how to convey how much I sunk into this book while reading it. Everything about it–the language, the characters, the mythology–wrapped little story claws around my mind and didn’t let me go until I finished it. Laini Taylor is just so good at creating atmosphere in her stories. It’s one of the reasons I will read anything she decides to write. The other reason this is going to be short is that […]
“Beautiful and full of monsters?” “All the best stories are.”
From Goodreads: 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 bolder than he to cross half the world in search of it. Then a stunning opportunity presents itself, in the person of a hero called the Godslayer and a band of legendary warriors, and he […]
“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.”
I love Laini Taylor. I adored Daughter of Smoke and Bone, and I really liked Days of Blood and Starlight. (I admit, I was not 100% enthusiastic about Dreams of Gods and Monsters. But as a whole, the trilogy was top-notch.) So I was ready to love this. And I did. Until the very last page.** Super quick overview here: Like the Smoke & Bone trilogy, Strange the Dreamer takes place in a fantasy world at an unknown time in history. Our hero, Lazlo Strange, […]
brb, reading this again
Laini. LAINI. What are you doing to me? I want to cry, right now, writing this review, thinking about Strange the Dreamer. It’s too much. It’s too beautiful, too peculiar, too visceral, too magical. What is in your imagination? How do you do this? Fantasy is such a stalwart genre for me because of how it truly takes me out of the every day and into a new place, sometimes a completely different place. Good fantasy has that quality of evoking wonder and provoking the […]
Well that was darker than expected
3.5 stars. Just like faintingviolet, I had to rush out and get the sequel to Daughter of Smoke and Bone. It ended on a bit of a cliffhanger and I just had to find out what was next for Karou, Akiva, and company. Like many middle books of trilogies, there was a lot of set-up and plot mechanics to wade through in Days of Blood and Starlight. It was still very readable however and Taylor did a good job of building tension and suspense while […]