The Starless Sea in Around the Year in 52 Books

Dec 31, 2020 Jacqie rated it it was ok

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. The word for this book is twee. And I'm as sad about it as anybody, because I loved The Night Circus and was ready to love this book. Now I wonder if I was wrong about The Night Circus and it was just as twee as this, only I didn't notice it? I'm afraid to find out.

The book tries so, so hard to be otherworldly. It goes through spates. Of short sentences. To show you. That there is. Drama. It tries to be portentous but ends up being more pretentious. ( I am admittedly pleased with the previous se The word for this book is twee. And I'm as sad about it as anybody, because I loved The Night Circus and was ready to love this book. Now I wonder if I was wrong about The Night Circus and it was just as twee as this, only I didn't notice it? I'm afraid to find out.

The book tries so, so hard to be otherworldly. It goes through spates. Of short sentences. To show you. That there is. Drama. It tries to be portentous but ends up being more pretentious. ( I am admittedly pleased with the previous sentence.) It uses language poorly. For instance, in one sentence walls are described as both opaque and translucent at the same time. Too many adjectives! Pick one; they can't be both simultaneously. No, not even with magic.

The main character is Zachary Ezra Rawlins. I can remember his full name so well because the author uses his full name (Zachary Ezra Rawlins!) to begin each chapter in which he is the POV. Why? I don't know, unless she really likes the name Zachary Ezra Rawlins and wants to use it as much as possible. We are also informed that he is Zachary, never Zach. Okay then. Zachary is a 24 year old graduate student in Alternative Media Studies or something- basically he studies and analyzes video games. I suppose this could be a real graduate program. Zachary feels to himself like an old soul. When he's asked to moderate a talk at at video game club, he looks around and feels so much older than all the students around him. Maybe it's because I'm more than twice Zachary's age, but this made me tired. Dude. You are three or four years older than these other students, tops. Get over yourself. As it turns out some of those undergraduates are much older than they appear so he's wrong anyway. Things aren't always what they seem, Zachary!

Zachary starts off pretty flummoxed in this book because between terms at school he likes to read a lot, randomly, whatever he comes across in the library. He ends up with a book called Sweet Sorrows and the book tells him the exact story of what happened to him one day when he was seven. This would definitely flummox me too. Zachary fears that he's missed his chance at the door that would lead him to a magical place. This would bum me out too. Zachary ends up meeting all sorts of mysterious people, going to mysterious places, and trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I feel you there, Zachary.

The author steps sideways from the main story pretty often to tell short fairy tale-type stories. These tales end up being the backstory of what's going on in the book, although what's actually going on isn't ever spelled out.

The book felt bloated to me. There's Zachary Ezra Rawlins, there's all the tales that are asides from his story, there's the framing story with the pirate which is a metaphor (or is it? not really, it's a thing that basically happened, on e more example of the book being twee) it's 600 pages of wandering around in a place that the author desperately wants you to think is the coolest place ever. The underground realm of books, protected by Acolytes, Guardians and Keepers, doesn't seem to have an actual purpose. No one except the select few admitted can go there to read. Is it an archive of every story ever told? Is it an accounting of the stories of everyone who's ever lived? I don't know.

So I think the book leans hard on its likely readers-those who love books. For people like that (including me) the books themselves are enough. The idea of a whole subterranean world of shelves and shelves and shelves of books, crumbling statues, a Kitchen that will get you whatever you want, rooms trimmed in dark wood and velvet for you to retire to whenever you get sleepy- I would go to there. It's a magnificent setting- but it doesn't seem to have a purpose.

There is a LOT of symbolism. There are hearts, keys, bees, swords, feathers, crowns. These motifs are everywhere all the time. Oh, time is a motif as well. And Fate. And the Moon. And owls. There's just a lot.

Really, the theme of the book is endings. The first clue to this is in the name of Zachary's book, Sweet Sorrows. The Harbor on the Starless Sea beneath the earth, the eternal library, must end. Why? I couldn't tell you, but it must. To transform into a new story, or something. Zachary is the key to this. (So why, when he rolled the symbol dice, did he get six Hearts? Wouldn't he have gotten at least some Keys?)

And this where I think the author cheats. For most transformations/endings, there must be a sacrifice. And there is in this book. But there's a happy ending anyway. This is the kind of book that would be a great Netflix series, because there's so much imagery and so much you can do with mysterious side stories and oblique plot lines. But when it comes right down to it, it's like one of those pretty, pretty series in which nothing really happens. It's JJ Abrams making everything seem Important when it is just the next pretty thing he happened to think of and put on screen. It's a LOT of effort for what it ends up being.

I might be harsh by giving to book only two stars. It was a pretty book. But it seemed so consciously pretty, so purposefully mysterious, it worked so hard for atmosphere, that it got in its own way. The setting is gorgeous, the characters are not much more than video game characters to give information or move our player character to where he needs to be. The plot has already really happened, except for the very last bit. I am wary of another book by this author at this point. ...more

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Oct 26, 2020 Hannah Peterson rated it it was ok

Shelves: aty-2019-2020

I read The Night Circus in 2018, so it's not that I didn't know what I was getting into here. I expected the dreamy atmosphere, the lovely writing, the gorgeous visuals, and I expected that there wouldn't be much plot or character development. Unfortunately, although the pleasure of the hazy, dreamy experience in The Night Circus balanced the hazy sort of plot and characterization, I didn't find the same to be true for The Starless Sea.

I expected to like The Starless Sea because the subjects - I read The Night Circus in 2018, so it's not that I didn't know what I was getting into here. I expected the dreamy atmosphere, the lovely writing, the gorgeous visuals, and I expected that there wouldn't be much plot or character development. Unfortunately, although the pleasure of the hazy, dreamy experience in The Night Circus balanced the hazy sort of plot and characterization, I didn't find the same to be true for The Starless Sea.

I expected to like The Starless Sea because the subjects - stories, libraries, narrative, mythology, even video games - are all ones that are quite personally important to me and certainly things that I enjoy reading and thinking about. But I didn't find Erin Morgenstern's style, which I enjoyed in The Night Circus, to be a particularly effective way of exploring those themes that so interest me. I think that part of the reason is that a circus is a performance and therefore actually quite well-suited to being described in lush detail - the visual spectacle of the magic circus was such a treat to read about, and the long descriptions of it made me feel like I was a visitor to the circus, experiencing it in the same way that a real visitor would. Circus acts don't need narrative structure to be compelling because it's the spectacle itself that's on show. But while I love the idea of the underground, labyrinthine library of the Harbor, it simply wasn't as interesting to read descriptions of, because much of it is just corridors of books and cozy rooms to read them in. There were some moments of description that I was truly delighted by, but I spent a lot of the book wishing for more like that (the dollhouse room, the ghostly party) and less of some of the other things.

What's more, Morgenstern is clearly really interested in the different ways that stories can be told (something that I am also quite interested in) but chose to take that in a different direction than I wanted. In what seems like a deliberate choice, Morgenstern makes her characters just chess pieces in a larger story, outside of their control, but I don't believe that that's what stories are about, even stories that are about time and fate and magic. This book begins with a fair amount of narrative tension that later ends up being completely undercut by the message of the book, which is that the story exists outside of individual characters. This means that the characters often act in ways that are merely them "playing their parts." For example, Zachary spends much of the book being disappointed that he did not walk through the door to the Starless Sea when he first found it as a child, but this disappointment is entirely ungrounded - the era of the Starless Sea that he's longing for happened long before he was born and he wouldn't have met Dorian if he had gone to the Harbor earlier. Many of the characters' emotions and motivations feel like this: that they act for the sake of the story and their emotions feel layered on top, confusingly portrayed and irrelevant to their actions.

If either of these two issues had been different - if the characters' motivations and emotions had been clearer or if the setting had been as vivid as the previous book - I think I would have enjoyed this very much: the writing was lovely and I don't mind a meandering story. But the sum total here didn't really work for me. ...more

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Apr 20, 2020 Jen K rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Zachery Ezra Rawlins is a grad student in VT studying video games. He is a bit of loner spending most of his time in the library where he finds a strange book, Sweet Sorrows, which is not in the library's computer system. It gets stranger when he finds chapters about his own life experiences in the book which is much older than he is and mention of a harbor on the Starless Sea. Zachery sets off to investigate the history of the book and to find the Starless Sea. Each section alternates with a bo ...more

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