The House in the Cerulean Sea (Cerulean Chronicles, #1)

by T.J. Klune

“Why are they like this?” “I don’t pretend to know the minds of men,” she said, hands tightening on the steering wheel as a woman on the sidewalk appeared to shield her chubby, squawking children away from the car. “They fear what they don’t understand. And that fear turns to hate for reasons I’m sure even they can’t begin to comprehend. And since they don’t understand the children, since they fear them, they hate them. This can’t be the first time you’ve heard of this. It happens everywhere.”

Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it from existing for the rest of us.”

Humanity is so weird. If we’re not laughing, we’re crying or running for our lives because monsters are trying to eat us. And they don’t even have to be real monsters. They could be the ones we make up in our heads. Don’t you think that’s weird?” “I suppose. But I’d rather be that way than the alternative.” “Which is?” “Not feeling anything at all.”

Hate is loud, but I think you’ll learn it’s because it’s only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but so long as you remember you’re not alone, you will overcome.”

It’s—unfortunate. We get trapped in our own little bubbles, and even though the world is a wide and mysterious place, our bubbles keep us safe from that. To our detriment.” She sighed. “But it’s so easy because there’s something soothing about routine. Day in and day out, it’s always the same. When we’re shaken from that, when that bubble bursts, it can be hard to understand all that we’ve missed. We might even fear it. Some of us even fight to try and get it back. I don’t know that I would fight for it, but I did exist in a bubble.” She smiled ruefully. “Thank goodness you popped it.”

“I popped my bubble,” he told her, needing her to understand. “It kept me safe, but it also kept me from living. I shouldn’t have left in the first place.”

Oh, he wasn’t naïve enough to think it would be like this everywhere. He still saw the anger and the vitriol magical beings received in the bigger cities. There were rallies and marches in favor of registration, but what made him hope that things were changing were the counterprotesters who gathered in greater numbers. They were mostly young people, a mixture of the magical and humans alike, and Linus knew the old guard would soon be standing on their last legs. It was simply a matter of time.