You learn a lot about Minya and the details of the Carnage that made her the creature she is, and the gradual revelations and insights are stunning. The primary plot involves Sarai, Lazlo, and the other godspawn trying to prevent Minya from destroying Weep, without her making good on her threat to release Sarai’s soul. But it is also healing and hope and redemption, all woven together and written with such beauty and magic that it makes you ache. It is horror, hate, and vengeance, and pain, suffering, and loss. Muse of Nightmares refers to Sarai, and the love story between her and Lazlo is all that is pure and incandescent in the universe, but this is primarily Minya’s story. And whenever you can, and however you can, make them suffer.” “This was what Minya knew: Have an enemy, be an enemy. The gods were monstrous their five remaining half-human spawn are isolated, wary, but otherwise generally innocent teenagers. If you need a refresher, the godspawn are the children of the foreign “gods” that came to Weep and systematically kidnapped, raped, and impregnated most of the city’s women. She has an army of ghosts, unwilling slaves to her will, that she plans to use to punish Weep for the massacre of the other godspawn children 15 years prior. Using Sarai’s continued existence as leverage, Minya is blackmailing Lazlo, newly discovered to be a rather powerful godspawn himself, into helping her exact her revenge on the inhabitants of Weep. And by “downer” I mean I was screaming “OHMYGOD WHY LAINI, WHHHHYYYYY?” Sarai is dead, her ghost bound to the world only through the temperamental will of Minya. Strange the Dreamer ended on kind of a downer. You do everything I say, or I’ll let her soul go.” (Mar.Source Strange the Dreamer spoilers ahead! Gorgeously written in language simultaneously dark, lush, and enchanting, the book will leave readers eager for the next. While the pace is initially slow, momentum and tension build as love blossoms between two young people from warring factions, mysteries of identity develop, and critical events unfold in dreams, thanks to the gifts of a blue-skinned godspawn named Sarai. Almost miraculously, the opportunity comes his way, and Taylor’s story takes shape in Weep itself where, unbeknownst to humans, five “godspawn”-each with a special power-and the ghosts that serve them still endure, waiting to take revenge.

Lazlo Strange, an orphaned young librarian raised by monks, is obsessed with Weep and dreams of traveling across a dangerous desert to find it. The tale begins 200 years after humans wiped out the powerful Mesarthim in a war so devastating that the city where it took place was said to have vanished and became known only as Weep. In the first book of a duology, Taylor (the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy) again creates a complex and layered world of battling gods and humans.

Strange the dreamer sequel