Laini Taylor’s debut fantasy novel, Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer, is hard to classify regarding audience. The publisher designates it as a YA book targeting nine to twelve year olds. That would put it in the same category as Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books. On some levels, I think that’s a fair assessment. However, the demands regarding initial investment in reading time and language skills that Taylor has of her readers requires more patience, understanding, and appreciation of dialogue than those other books.
Those demands aren’t a negative thing. Rather, they further enhance a reader’s experience of the unfolding adventure. Although fairies and stories about fairies aren’t new by any means, Taylor makes them new again in this first book of her series. The author imagines a rich world filled with wonder and brings a language to it that makes it uniquely her own.
I fell in love with the main character almost immediately. How can you not love an independent-minded young faerie named Magpie Windwitch? Especially if her usual companions are a flock of surly, cigar-smoking crows? Taylor does an incredible job of making this world come to life. She calls the crows her “feathers,” and the diminutive is so cool that I was taken with the idea of hanging out with cigar-smoking crows myself just so I could call them “my feathers.”
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Magpie has a magnificent destiny ahead of her, which is usual in these kinds of fantasy novels, but somehow Taylor just makes everything seem fresh again. I liked that she created her version of the Ancient One who is supposed to know everything, yet is stumped when he first confronts Magpie and can’t explain her existence. That kind of revelation seem to mean that anything could happen and nothing was safe.
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