Review - "Strange The Dreamer"

Strange the Dreamer, Strange the Dreamer #1
by Laini Taylor
rating: ☆☆☆
published: 28th March 2017
spoilers? some pretty major ones

Goodreads

"You’re a storyteller. Dream up something wild and improbable," she pleaded. "Something beautiful and full of monsters." "Beautiful and full of monsters?" "All the best stories are."

There's really only one word to describe how I felt about this book. Disappointed. Because I loved Daughter of Smoke and Bone when I read it, and this book started off like it could reach similar heights. Unfortunately, it did not.

For the first say, 40% of the book, I was in love. The writing was gorgeous, as usual, the characters mysterious and interesting enough that I was captivated, and the plot maybe going slowly, but still with enough happening that I was interested. And then the instalove happened.

In young adult lit, I find there's instalove, and then there's Instalove. The former, I can just about deal with (it's clearly there, but there's also enough of a connection between the characters that I can about forgive it). The latter is the real killer, and that's what happened here. There is quite honestly nothing between Lazlo and Sarai, and yet they meet each other in a dream and are shoved together, and within about two meetings, they're in love. And from that point on, I was just bored of the whole book. Because Sarai is also a manic pixie dream girl kind of character, and to top it off, gets killed, and then resurrected so that the evil character can control Lazlo by controlling Sarai. Because why not. It's honestly depressing that this is the main female character.

On top of all that, the plot twist, that Lazlo is the son of a god, is one that you can see coming a goddamn mile off. It wasn't even a surprise. And not just because of the (slightly shoddily employed) foreshadowing. Genuinely because of the fact that there was not going to be another outcome to the story. I mean, boy who doesn't know his own origins, but feels a visceral pull towards a mysterious city that no outsiders have visited for over 200 years? Um. Can we get more obvious?

Perhaps what disappointed me most though, was the sheer amount of potential there was for a hate-to-love relationship between Lazlo and Thyon. And if we're going to go with instalove between Sarai and someone else, why couldn't it have been Calixte, a confirmed wlw? (I say confirmed, but in true Laini Taylor fashion, we get a 2 second glimpse of her relationship with another woman and then she doesn't appear further in the story.) And yet, what we end up with, is yet another heterosexual instalove tale. But I honestly don't know what else I expected. I mean, after all, we all know LGBT characters are hardly ever central to mainstream YA authors' plots unless it's to kill them.