I hereby nominate Laini Taylor as best fantasy writer of the year. I was going to say for best young adult fantasy, but there is no need to make that distinction: Muse of Nightmares, the sequel to last year’s Strange the Dreamer, is the quintessential fantasy that everyone else wishes he or she had written, and everyone who loves high fantasy will want to read.

When Strange the Dreamer came out in 2017 and I read it, I declared it my best book of 2017, saying this was the book I had been waiting for Taylor to write. If you would like to read the entire review, go here to the young adult blog of Burbank Public Library, for which I lately wrote and edited. The essence of that book was Lazlo Strange, the foundling librarian’s assistant with his head full of stories, and he continues near the center of this book, but his tale is expanded to embrace all those—humans, gods, and monsters—he has encountered along his way, across the great desert Elmuthaleth to the city now known as Weep, cowering in the shadow of a giant metal seraph with nightmares at its heart.

Muse of Nightmares picks up almost exactly where Strange the Dreamer left off, although it begins by introducing two new characters (one of whom we will discover that we already knew), and it proceeds to both fulfill and exponentially advance my opinion of Laini Taylor’s skills—as a lyrical and expressive writer, as a masterful storyteller, as an imaginative genius. Lush language carries you into the hearts of her characters, where you discover complexities of emotion and conflicts of conscience not often found in any story, particularly in a genre that follows specific tropes and often fails to deviate much from them. This is truly sophisticated fiction, dealing with large issues, and yet it also manages to be a blue whale of a good story, with so much content, so many conflicts and twists, and such gripping love for and between its characters that you simply can’t conceive of it ending!

It does, as all stories must, but the author is charitable to both her characters and her readers by putting out there the possibility that somewhere, between worlds, we may encounter Lazlo and Sarai, Minya, Feral and Ruby (the “gods”) and Thyon, Calixte, Tzara, Suheyla, and Ruza (the “humans”) yet again.

Do yourself a favor: Read these books.