What’s the most classic story—the oldest story in the world?
The fight of good over evil. The hero’s journey. The defeat of a villain.
But what happens when you don’t know who the bad guy is?
Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor invites us into a story with precisely this predicament. With multiple narrators, Taylor invites us into the minds of two unlikely heroes, both of whom are taught to see the other as their greatest threat.
These varying perspectives present a fascinating story, a strong moral debate, and no shortage of adventure—but does it have something more to offer?
In the field of bibliotherapy (the process of providing therapeutic help through reading), one of the valued outcomes is a shift in perspective.
As we’ve all experienced, stories take us places. They show us the world we’ve yet to see, and far off worlds that we will never see. They demonstrate the possible and the impossible. Perhaps that is what we love best about reading—the ability it gives us to go on grand adventures without ever leaving our bedroom.
But that’s not all it can do.
Reading also places us in circumstances and makes us feel emotions that we may never have experienced before. Reading gives us varying perspectives.
Keith Oatley described this process in his discussion on fiction.
“People who read it improve their understanding of others. This effect is especially marked with literary fiction, which also enables people to change themselves. These effects are due partly to the process of engagement in stories, which includes making inferences and becoming emotionally involved, and partly to the contents of fiction, which include complex characters and circumstances that we might not encounter in daily life.”
Keith Oatley
This effect of varying our perspectives is more prominent in reading than in other activities, because the act of reading by itself requires more brain activity. It forces us to engage and interact in a way that television does not.
When we are used to oversimplified stories of good vs. evil, sometimes we try to overlay that onto reality. But the truth is, in reality there isn’t usually a good guy and a bad guy. People are more complicated than that. Sometimes two sides with different opinions are just that—two sides with different opinions. There isn’t always someone who is in the wrong. And there isn’t always someone who is in the right.
Strange the Dreamer challenges our ideas about who is the hero and who is the villain, by offering us the varying perspective of both sides.
In our own lives we are limited to our own experiences and the experiences of those closest to us. As wide as those may be, there’s still so much more of the world around us, so many people we haven’t met, and such a range of emotions that we have yet to experience. Without the valued experiences that reading gives us, we may never even realize our own limitations.