Recommendations

Books Like Strange the Dreamer

A librarian obsessed with a forgotten city finally reaches it — and finds a girl who walks into dreams waiting in the ruins

Laini Taylor's Strange the Dreamer opens with Lazlo Strange, an orphan raised in a monastery library who has spent his whole life obsessed with a city called Weep — a name that replaced the city's true name two hundred years ago when someone stole it. When a legendary warrior named Eril-Fane arrives from Weep to recruit people for an expedition, Lazlo is one of the unlikely few who make the cut. In Weep he finds a city under a titanic structure of metal hands that block the sun, and discovers the godspawn — half-human children of the gods who used to own the city — including Sarai, who can walk into human dreams. If Taylor's lush, unusual prose, the impossible romance across every possible barrier, the city as a character, and the sense that dreams and reality are closer than they seem gripped you, these eight picks go to the same place.