With the city on the brink and old gods waking, two dreamers must rewrite a cycle of vengeance before it consumes them.
- Score
- 82.3
- Spice
- 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️Sweet
- POV
- multi
- Ending
- HEA / HFN
Tropes
Content warnings
Curated signals, not an exhaustive guarantee.
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What readers think
Readers consistently praise Laini Taylor's signature prose — lush, poetic, and transportive — as the book's greatest strength, with many calling it even more emotionally resonant than the first volume. The treatment of Minya as a trauma survivor rather than a simple villain is widely cited as the standout achievement: readers love that her cruelty is rooted in a child's grief frozen in time. The Kora and Nova subplot is praised for adding emotional texture and mythic scope. The most recurring criticism is that the central mystery feels too similar to the Daughter of Smoke and Bone trilogy, recycling themes Taylor has explored before; the mid-book introduction of an unrelated POV feels disconnected; and a new villain arriving in the final act is seen as narratively disruptive. Pacing issues from the first book persist. Overall sentiment is strongly positive — readers consider it a satisfying and emotionally generous conclusion to the duology.
Read it if
- · Readers who fell in love with Strange the Dreamer and want full emotional payoff and resolution
- · Fans of literary YA fantasy that centres trauma, redemption arcs, and morally complex antagonists over action plotting
- · Anyone who enjoys prose-forward storytelling with deeply felt found-family dynamics and a meditation on what makes a monster
Skip it if
- · You haven't read Strange the Dreamer — this is a direct continuation and makes little sense as a standalone
- · You are fatigued by Laini Taylor's prose style or her recurring themes of traumatic origin stories and star-crossed mythic romance
- · You need a tightly plotted, momentum-driven conclusion — the pacing is uneven and the new POV thread can feel like a detour
If you liked this
- · For fans of Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor — the same author's earlier duology, sharing star-crossed mythology, lyrical prose, and a focus on how love survives impossible circumstances
- · For fans of The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden — dark, myth-soaked fantasy with a brooding atmosphere and a heroine navigating a world of spirits and power
- · For fans of Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor — the direct predecessor; read both back-to-back for the full emotional arc
- · Like Caraval by Stephanie Garber but with deeper thematic weight — similarly dream-drenched and atmospheric, but with more serious engagement with trauma and morality
In this series
Part of Strange the Dreamer — read in order:
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