bloodygranuaile | The sins of the fathers

Last weekend I went to Florida to visit my dad and Melissa, and I got to do a relax and read a whole fiction book. In this case it was an ARC of Laini Taylor's Muse of Nightmares, the sequel to her fantastic Strange the Dreamer.

This book picks up pretty much where the last one leaves off. The last one left off with many major plot twists, so talking about where this book starts would be pretty much a big batch of spoilers. Hmm.

In proper Book Two fashion, we also start to get backstory, not on the main characters, but on the civilizational conflict. A few small Easter eggs tie it into the conflicts of the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series; it has been too many years since I've read the Fairies of Dreamdark books to have spotted if they fit the cosmology as well. But basically, the scope of the story widens, encompassing a few additional centuries and a few additional worlds. In proper Laini Taylor fashion, it is both very sappy and extremely brutal, with ties of love and hate and grief driving people to rack up bananas body counts and inflict unimaginable traumas on other people. Maladaptive psychology is a definite theme, with Sarai's gift as a dreamwalker allowing her to poke about in people's subconsciouses, witnessing all the ways the mind copes with staggering loss and brutality.

The book also has much more sexiness than one would expect considering that one half of the main romantic pairing is dead, but that's Laini Taylor for you. On a political level, it's good that people aren't dancing around this stuff in teen fiction anymore; from a craft perspective, it's well done; from a being me as a reader perspective, it's dead (ha) boring. I can't tell if there's something about it that's actually more boring than the first book or if I am just feeling less generous than usual about slogging through pages of horny teens being horny teens.

Anyway, that's... really my only criticism. The rest of it is lush and poetic and whimsical and tragic and murdery, full of very bizarre plot twists and exciting near-misses. There is fun wonderful wish-fulfillmenty magic and terrifying psychological horror magic, and everything in between. I can't wait for whatever she writes next.