Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Genre(s): Fantasy / Speculative Fiction
Book Synopsis:
Zachary Ezra Rawlins is a graduate student in Vermont when he discovers a mysterious book hidden in the stacks. As he turns the pages, entranced by tales of lovelorn prisoners, key collectors, and nameless acolytes, he reads something strange: a story from his own childhood.
Bewildered by this inexplicable book and desperate to make sense of how his own life came to be recorded, Zachary uncovers a series of clues—a bee, a key, and a sword—that lead him to a masquerade party in New York, to a secret club, and through a doorway to an ancient library hidden far below the surface of the earth. What Zachary finds in this curious place is more than just a buried home for books and their guardians—it is a place of lost cities and seas, lovers who pass notes under doors and across time, and of stories whispered by the dead. Zachary learns of those who have sacrificed much to protect this realm, relinquishing their sight and their tongues to preserve this archive, and also of those who are intent on its destruction.
Together with Mirabel, a fierce, pink-haired protector of the place, and Dorian, a handsome, barefoot man with shifting alliances, Zachary travels the twisting tunnels, darkened stairwells, crowded ballrooms, and sweetly soaked shores of this magical world, discovering his purpose—in both the mysterious book and in his own life.
Review:
I’ve been hearing things about this book for some time and finally sat down to read it… And honestly, I was a little disappointed.
It starts out with a series of seemingly unrelated stories. They’re each chapter-length by themselves, and by the end of the third story I was considering giving up. None of those stories have anything to do with the synopsis. But I kept reading, because it had to come together somehow.
The unrelated stories do make sense later. Some are part of the “mysterious book” Zachary finds, but it wasn’t immediately clear how everything fit together. Once I got a little farther, the random changes to stories in the book and back to Zachary made more sense. Each major section featured a different mysterious book, and they all tied in somehow to Zachary’s story, some more loosely than others.
I was not a fan of the back-and-forth format. I think the book would have been fine without the inclusion of most of the short stories. Breaking the main story up like that made it feel incredibly slow, particularly through parts 1 and 2. I almost stopped reading a few times because nothing seemed to be happening and my interest was definitely waning.
Things finally started to happen around the 60% mark. That’s a long time for any real action to occur in a book, and while some elements of the earlier story were compelling, it dragged. But I enjoyed the last 40% of the book much more than what came before, and I really liked the ending of Zachary and Dorian’s portion of the story. (Again, I could have done without the side story in the final act, which was Kat’s. I skipped past parts of it because it didn’t interest me that much.)
This book did have some things going for it though. Some of the descriptive passages were beautifully written and the world could be fascinating at times. I liked most of the characters and the fact that the book did have a happy ending for the main cast. It just took a while to take off and actually get anywhere.
Author website: erinmorgenstern.com
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