Reviews with content warning for Emotional abuse - Strange the Dreamer

The Good:
• Beautiful prose
• Omniscient narrator, looks into all POV
• World building unfolds gradually

The Bad:
• Romance felt a bit shallow

You Might Like This if You Like:
• Disney's Atlantis
• Lost Kingdoms
• Fairytales

Wow! I adored my time in Weep. Laini Taylor's prose here is very soothing—perfectly suited for the dreaminess of this story.

The lost kingdom premise sucked me in immediately. It reminded me very much of Atlantis, which has been a comfort movie for me for awhile.

I really enjoyed both Lazlo and Sarai as protagonists. They're both thoughtful and caring. That said, I felt that the relationship between them was very surface level. I get that this is YA, but it was almost too fairytale for me.

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hotpinkmess's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.5

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angelareads's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious sad tense medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

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oddduck's review against another edition

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mysterious reflective slow-paced

4.0

This was a reread for me, and I did not remember anything that had happened (because I read this 5 years ago, when it first came out), but as I was reading this time, I was very certain that many of my thoughts were the same ones I had the first time I read this.

For starters, this is a very beautiful book. I love the cover, and the writing itself is also very lovely. I was especially drawn to the way she kept slipping absolutely knockout lines about the nature of humanity in amongst the description and exposition. The first time I read this and got to the part where Sarai tells Lazlo, "Good people do all the things bad people do. It's just that when they do them, they call it justice." I had to stop reading, copy the quote down, and just sit for a minute. And Laini Taylor drops lines like that everywhere in this book! It was quite delightful for me.

I also remembered how much I loved the complexity of this story. The relationship between the citizens of Weep and the surviving godspawn was especially fascinating to me because both sides have very valid feelings about what happened. The mesarthim very much terrorized and traumatized Weep for two centuries, so it's hard to feel bad about Eril-Fane murdering them. It's really the murder of the baby godspawn that is the sticking point. Because I understand why he did it, but I still can't help but wonder how those children might have grown up if they'd been sent somewhere else, where they could be raised with love (because that was never going to happen in Weep and after the trauma those people went through, raising the godspawn would only be inflicting further trauma on them). So I understand Eril-Fane's motivation and don't think he was really wrong in his actions, but we also get Sarai and Minya's views, and their feelings about this situation also make sense and are justified. This whole situation is very complicated and messy and it's one where there is no solution that will make everyone happy, which is very difficult to deal with, but it's handled very adeptly here.

Despite all the things I enjoyed in about this book, I did have a hard time getting into it and staying in it. Part of this, I think, is that I don't really care for full on fantasy worlds, which this is. It's nothing against this book or fantasy in general, it's just hard for me personally to read, and I acknowledge that and read accordingly. Beyond that though, this book was just very slow to me, especially at the beginning. The scene where Thyon Nero requisitions Lazlo's books about Weep spanned far too many chapters, for example, because there was a lot of backstory and exposition that got in the way. It was all interesting, and I know why it was included, but because the writing style itself is very slow, all of these extra scenes in the middle of the the action made parts of this really drag for me. This technique also made it difficult to remember what was happening in the present, even with the narrative clues, purely because there was so much other information I had to absorb. And this continued throughout the book. The last 50 or so pages were probably my favorite, because so much happened, and it all happened in a much faster pace. It was exciting and I wish the rest of the book had been more like that, because the story itself is very interesting.

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