Francesca's Thoughts

I can’t believe I’ve never talked about Laini Taylor’s work here before. Or I don’t think I have? I hadn’t come across her stuff until she did a lockdown Zoom event with Maggie Stiefvater, which I am now realising was probably a half-decade ago. So it’s time for you to also immerse yourself in Laini’s work! (An update from Editing Francesca: I mentioned her Daughter of Smoke and Bone series in passing a couple of years ago. Might have to do a Read, If You Like for that too.)

Read Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor (2017), if you like…

• Lush, considered prose. If you enjoy prose that takes you by the hand and guides you through a world a bit like a hot bubble bath on a cold day, you’ll like this novel.
• Genuinely interesting interpretations of folklore. Strange the Dreamer is about mythologies and folklore, and feels like reading a mythology or folk tale. Is that an interpretation of folklore? Is it a harnessing of the atmosphere of folklore? I’m not sure. I suspect it is related to the bubble bath metaphor, which I have not thought through but I am writing this on quite a cold day in which I would love a bubble bath, so we’ll revisit this imagery later if I remember to do so.
• Moths.
• Discussion of war, colonialism and violence that’s more nuanced than “invasions bad” or “revenge understandable.”
• The colour blue.
• Libraries.
• Young adult novels with substance. I think I’ve written before about YA versus adult fiction (if I haven’t or if you’re new, the rule of thumb I follow is that a novel counts as young adult if it’s about young people having a coming-of-age experience, and it’s adult if the adult-aged, or thereabouts, characters are settled in themselves when the story comes along and unsettles them. Maggie Stiefvater writes eloquently about this). I adore coming of age stories, but I’m not so interested in YA novels set entirely in, say, a secondary school where the biggest stakes are who invites who to an end-of-term dance. Give me coming of age against the backdrop of Weird Shit, or Intense Shit, or Historical Shit. Strange the Dreamer is wonderfully and weirdly magical and, in places, incredibly dark. It predates the Tiktokification of reading; I’m unsure if it would be classed as YA today, or if an editor or publisher would either insist on the editing out of some of the darker themes in order to market it to teens, or would instead market it as adult or new adult. Characters come of age and it covers some emotionally intense ground. SUBSTANCE.
• More moths. There are so many moths.

I’m waiting for the sequel to come in to the library, which is producing the sort of general humming anticipation I hope I never get too old for.

Have you read Strange the Dreamer? What did you think of it? Let me know in a comment.

Look after yourselves,
Francesca

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