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Oct 24, 2018sbridge48 rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
I was all set to praise this book as one of the 3-4 best single volume (not part of a series) fantasies I had ever read - until I got to the ending and found that it would be the first of two books! (The author confesses in the afterword that she was surprised, too.) It is still terrific. I think I wanted the personal emotional fulfillment of getting it all wrapped up in one book. Once I got over that, I realized (as the author undoubtedly did also) that providing a satisfactory ending at that point would require several characters to suddenly change personalities and cave in to everyone else. And she doesn’t write those kinds of characters. The story and settings are so creative and complex that I have trouble figuring out how much to tell you and where to start. The style of writing is such that anything I say is a spoiler, from the first chapter on. Laini Taylor really knows how to build a story. Every chapter sets up a mystery, and as the book progresses, it seems like every subsequent chapter answers one question and poses two new ones. The book title itself is a mystery with several layers. The main character is Lazlo Strange, an orphan adopted by the royal librarians of a strange medieval-like city. He is thought of by the librarians as a “dreamer” – someone whose head is filled with fairy tales and stories of the past, not quite connected to reality. They call him “Strange the Dreamer”. But the name implies to us a poetic construction of “the dreamer is strange” (like “how bright the sun” or “how green the tree”). And Lazlo eventually discovers that his actual dreams are indeed strange and wonderful. Lazlo is especially mesmerized by the stories that one of the elderly librarians tells about a mysterious city with no name. Travel to and from that city, on the other side of the desert, stopped a couple of centuries ago. It used to have a name but several years ago the name disappeared from every book and memory - now it is only referred to as The Unseen City - or "Weep." And in Weep itself we see that there are five strange teenagers in hiding. They have fantastic powers; but they are terrified to let anyone know where they are. “Strange Dreams” are also part of their lives – along with ghosts and horrifying memories. Their skin is blue. It’s a wonderful (“full of wonder”) book that deserves awards and a large readership.