Muse of Nightmares was released last Tuesday, and if you haven’t read it yet, you should definitely put it on your TBR. It’s getting to be that time of year where I start thinking about what the best books of the year were, and there’s a good chance that this book is going to make the Top Ten Books I Read for the First Time in 2018 list.
Because this review is the second in a duology, there may be spoilers for the first book.
This book begins where Strange the Dreamer left off. Lazlo discovered that he was godspawn, Sarai was dead, and Minya was trying to get Lazlo to do her bidding to allow her to go down to Weep and let her get her revenge on the humans. What a mess! Of course, Lazlo is this gentle soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly. What is a poor boy who loves his Sarai to do?
In addition to the difficult situation the godspawn were left in, we were left with questions. Where did all the other babies go? Why did Lazlo suddenly turn into godspawn when for twenty years he was just an ordinary boy? What does the bird flying around have to do with anything (and why is the bird on the cover of this book? All of that will be answered in Muse of Nightmares.
I don’t want to give too much away, but Lazlo and Sarai’s relationship continues, the humans down in Weep finally meet the godspawn, and secrets are revealed about the universe that I certainly didn’t expect. The characters that we loved in the first book are back, and most of them grow and become better people.
Just like Strange, Muse is a beautiful book with gorgeous prose. Laini Taylor has such a lovely way of writing. The alluring words made me want to keep reading. The world that she built is imaginative, and the way that she writes it makes it vivid. You grow to love the characters and empathize with them.
Another thing that I loved about reading this book was that it has such a beautiful message to it. Minya wants revenge for what happened to her. The humans who were exploited have reason to hate the godspawn. Another character that we will meet when we read this book has another reason to hate. One of my favorite lines in this book is repeated twice: Let all the ugliness end here.
It’s such a timely message. Let all the ugliness end here. If we could get one thing from reading this book, that would be it. Wouldn’t the world be such a better place if we could all just listen to each other? To try to understand where other people are coming from? There would be so much less anger floating in the air if we could just get that. Just like the humans, godspawn, and the new character we meet in Strange the Dreamer and Muse of Nightmares, almost all of us are trying to do the right thing. Sometimes the right thing is not easy to discern. Maybe if we were all a little more like Lazlo and Sarai, our hearts would heal.
The ugliness does end, at least for the characters here. I won’t say what happens, but I was in tears for the last 50 pages of the book or so, it was so beautiful. The ugliness even ends for some of the characters that you might not even think could change. Not everyone gets a happy ever after, and not everybody’s soul can mend, but the end was perfect.
Or was it? This book opens itself up to fanfiction or further books in the series. Maybe we’ll see some more novellas from here. That would be nice.