Laini Taylor Books

Laini Taylor writes sentences other authors screenshot. She started in fairy-flavored middle grade with the Dreamdark books, Blackbringer (2007) and Silksinger (2009), then announced herself as a major voice with Lips Touch: Three Times (2009), a collection of three supernatural kiss stories that became a National Book Award finalist. But her defining work arrived in 2011. Daughter of Smoke and Bone introduced Karou, a blue-haired art student in Prague who runs errands for a chimaera wishmonger through doors that open anywhere in the world, and Akiva, the seraph enemy she was never supposed to love. The trilogy, completed by Days of Blood and Starlight (2012) and Dreams of Gods and Monsters (2014), became an international bestseller and a template the genre still borrows from. Hollywood circled the trilogy for years, and its fingerprints are visible on a decade of angel and demon romances that followed.

Then she somehow topped it. Strange the Dreamer (2017) follows Lazlo Strange, a war orphan and junior librarian obsessed with a lost city whose true name was stolen from every mind on earth. It won a Printz Honor and its sequel, Muse of Nightmares (2018), closed the duology with the story of Sarai, a blue-skinned girl who walks through dreams, and a meditation on what victims of gods owe each other. In 2025 she returned to the Dreamdark world with a new Guardians of Dreamdark project, bringing her career full circle, with more scheduled into 2026. The duology is beloved on this site for good reason: it is the rare fantasy where the prose, the plot, and the romance all operate at the same very high level.

What defines Taylor is language and moral symmetry. Her prose is lush, playful, and dense with metaphor, cake as a way of life, libraries as holy places, and every war in her books has two sides with legitimate grief. Her romances are forbidden love at maximum voltage, star-crossed across species and centuries of slaughter, yet she never lets the love story erase the atrocity that separates her lovers. The angels commit genocides. The monsters mourn. Nobody in the genre handles enemy lovers with this much honesty about the enemy part. She is married to the illustrator Jim Di Bartolo, and the visual, painterly quality of her imagination feels like part of a household style.

On heat, Taylor sits at a 1 on our spice scale. There is profound sensuality in her books, dreams where lovers meet because touch is impossible in the flesh, but the doors close and the books are published for YA crossover audiences. The intensity comes from prose and impossibility, not explicit content. If yearning were a controlled substance, though, her books would be scheduled. Readers who need explicit payoff should treat her as a change of pace rather than a main course, and readers who love longing should clear their calendars.

For romantasy readers, Taylor is essential ancestry. The current wave of enemies to lovers romantasy, with its warring species and fated bonds, owes an enormous debt to Karou and Akiva, and readers regularly rediscover her backlist through BookTok and marvel that it predates the boom. She is the writer to reach for when you want the tropes you love elevated into literature without losing any of their pulse.

Start with Strange the Dreamer if you want her at the height of her powers in a tidy two-book arc, or Daughter of Smoke and Bone if you want the full trilogy experience and more romance-forward pacing. Lips Touch: Three Times is a perfect single-evening sampler of her voice. Wherever you start, read her slowly. These are not books to skim, and the sentences are half the point.