Cover & Prologue Reveal: Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor

Thursday 31 March 2016

 
Strange the Dreamer | Laini Taylor | Published September 2016
Goodreads 

What do you think of the covers?
The blue on the left is the UK cover and the yellow and blue on the right is the US cover.
The UK version is my favourite!

Prologue:

On the second sabbat of Twelfthmoon, in the city of Weep, a girl fell from the sky.

Her skin was blue, her blood was red.

She broke over an iron gate, crimping it on impact, and there she hung, impossibly arched, graceful as a temple dancer swooning on a lover’s arm. One slick finial anchored her in place. Its point, protruding from her sternum, glittered like a brooch. She fluttered briefly as her ghost shook loose, and then her hands relaxed, shedding fistfuls of freshly picked torch ginger buds.

Later, they would say these had been hummingbird hearts and not blossoms at all.

They would say she hadn’t shed blood but wept it. That she was lewd, tonguing her teeth at them, upside down and dying, that she vomited a serpent that turned to smoke when it hit the ground. They would say a flock of moths had come, frantic, and tried to lift her away.

That was true. Only that.

They hadn’t a prayer, though. The moths were no bigger than the startled mouths of children, and even dozens together could only pluck at the strands of her darkening hair until their wings sagged, sodden with her blood. They were purled away with the blossoms as a grit-choked gust came blasting down the street. The earth heaved underfoot. The sky spun on its axis. A queer brilliance lanced through billowing smoke, and the people of Weep had to squint against it. Blowing grit and hot light and the stink of saltpeter. There had been an explosion. They might have died, all and easily, but only this girl had, shaken from some pocket of the sky.

Her feet were bare, her mouth stained damson. Her pockets were all full of plums. She was young and lovely and surprised and dead.

She was also blue.

Blue as opals, pale blue. Blue as cornflowers, or dragonfly wings, or a spring—not summer—sky.

Someone screamed. The scream drew others. The others screamed, too, not because a girl was dead, but because the girl was blue, and this meant something in the city of Weep. Even after the sky stopped reeling, and the earth settled, and the last fume spluttered from the blast site and dispersed, the screams went on, feeding themselves from voice to voice, a virus of the air.

The blue girl’s ghost gathered itself and perched, bereft, upon the spearpoint-tip of the projecting finial, just an inch above her own still chest. Gasping in shock, she tilted back her invisible head and gazed, mournfully, up.

The screams went on and on.

And across the city, atop a monolithic wedge of seamless, mirror-smooth metal, a statue stirred, as though awakened by the tumult, and slowly lifted its great horned head.

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Will you be adding this book to your TBR? I'm going to be reading the Daughter of Smoke and Bone series in the run up to this release which I'm excited about. Have you read that series? Let me know your thoughts!

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7 comments:

  1. I really need to read the smoke and bone trilogy, there has been so much love for it and it has been on my radar for months and months now (although I am not a great fan of the UK editions of the trilogy so might need to find the US ones online). I personally prefer the US edition of Strange the Dreamer as well, I love when gold is involved!

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    1. Me too! I've been saying for soo long that I'm going to read it but then something else comes along and it gets forgotten about again. I'll need to try and read it before this one comes out! Ohh I'll need to go and check out the differences between the editions. It's always a bit frustrating when the US have better ones haha. I usually like a bit of gold too but just love that shade of blue! :)

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    2. Another thing I have noticed about US editions books is some of their editions are more floppy, making it harder to bend the spines so they look newer on the shelves (bonus!).

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    3. I've noticed this too! They are so much better than the paperbacks we get here which I pretty much just peek in to avoid any spine creasing.

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    4. So true, my mum use to make fun of the way that I barely opened my books when I was reading. I explained it to her and now I am well on the way to training her to do the same.

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    5. I actually talked to my mum about this recently as she laughed at me for protecting the spines too. It's my mission to make her see our ways now!

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    6. Yes! We will convert them!

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