I actually liked Muse of Nightmares a lot more than Strange the Dreamer. The beginning was just okay, but the story got a lot better as it progressed. This book was of similar pacing to the first one, but it felt more necessary and enjoyable.
The side characters (not Lazlo and Sarai) got better from this book. A bunch of characters that I considered “tolerable” became much more interesting. The perspectives were more meaningful that the prior book. We get more insight into Eril-Fane and Azareen, and how Sarai is their half daughter, so we get family reunions and I liked it. Also Thyon gets so much better and we kind of see how he’s a genuinely good person. He talks about how he regrets being mean to Lazlo, and it makes me feel really sympathetic towards him. Also I really didn’t like Minya in the first book but so much information got revealed and I feel really bad for her now. We get a lot of information about her and why she was sort of evil in the first book. Ruby, Sparrow, and Feral were good characters, but I felt like there wasn’t as much to them as there were for all the others.
With Kora and Nova, I enjoyed their side story in this. I mean I appreciated that she suddenly stopped being insane after Sarai talked to her, but for me, it was almost too immediate. Her mood took a huge turn, and it felt kind of unnatural. I felt like they didn’t really do much for the story, other than offer another side plot device. They didn’t contribute much towards the story and honestly this book would have been fine without them.
This book answered a lot of the questions from the first book, which made it more interesting in general. I liked the plot more in this than Strange the Dreamer. It talks about why the god spawn are even here in the first place and it gives a lot of information into the powers that they were exploiting.
I really liked the ending together because it tied everything up from this book and even the prior one. We get to know the name of the city which takes us back full circle, and it was a good conclusion to the series. Also it opens up even more questions which sounds like there might be another book? Overall, I’m happy I finally started/finished the series, and I would recommend this to anyone who likes YA fantasy as well.