The Starless Sea

''Far beneath the surface of the earth, hidden from the sun and the moon, upon the shores of the Starless Sea, there is a labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories. Stories written in books and sealed in jars and painted on walls. Odes inscribed onto skin and pressed into rose petals. Tales laid in tiles upon the floors, bits of plot hung from chandeliers. Stories cataloged and cared for and revered. Old stories preserved while new stories spring up around them.''
I don't think there are words to describe this book accurately. If magic, dreams and the essence of what stories mean for us could be found within the pages of a book, tangible enough for us to touch, this would be it...

Zachary is tempted by a strange show more book that has been forgotten in his university library. He is soon shocked to find that it contains secrets of his own childhood, along with beautiful, mystical legends of love and loss. Fate brings Mirable and Dorian in his way, two mysterious characters who seem to hold the answer to Zachary's quest for an explanation. And somewhere close by the owls are watching…

''Isn't that what anyone wants, though? [...] To be able to make your own choices and decisions but to have it be part of a story? You want that narrative there to trust in, even if you want to maintain your own free will.''
Morgenstern has created a tale out of tales, a fable out of the human need to seek and explain, to dream and understand. Zachary's story is closely connected to an array of beautiful stories/myths that focus on the unique ability to make the impossible possible. Each door leads to another step (but is it really a step forward...?), each character is a puzzle piece that can acquire multiple places on the board. Matryoshka dolls open and close within the pages as we try to guess and navigate along with Zachary, Mirabel, and Dorian.

''These doors will sing. Silent siren songs for those who seek what lies behind them.
For those who feel homesick for a place they've never been to.
Those who seek even if they do not know what (or where) is that they are seeking.
Those who seek will find.
Their doors have been waiting for them.''

Morgenstern's stories elevate the novel to perfection. From our need to touch the stars, to acquire the unattainable, to turn our dreams into reality, to throw our nightmares away like torn pieces of paper. Stories that are dark and menacing, stories of light and hope, on impossible love and dangerous antagonists, storied born in a world where dollhouses expand and create actual communities, where the Sun and the Moon meet to discuss the future of the world, where the Moon falls in love with a mortal man and Time falls in love with Fate, where young girls converse with ghosts, where women sculpt stories, where pirates and young women embark on adventures in the Starless Sea.

This book is for each one of us. The ones who love stories and magic, travelling to a place where we need to expect the unexpected. This isn't about liking Fantasy or any other literary label. This is about living in a story the likes of which we haven't seen before. This is about experiencing what it means when we talk about unbearably beautiful writing...

''Why then do you think the stories continue to be told once the children are grown?''

My reviews can also be found on https://theopinionatedreaderblog.wordpress.com/ show less

The person who recommended The Night Circus to me years ago said it was like “reading a painting” and YES, EXACTLY. The Night Circus was aesthetically pleasing and immersive and it told a story. I adored that book.

The Starless Sea, on the other hand, felt like reading a dream. Like a dream, it was lovely and whimsical sometimes and a fuzzy slog the rest of the time.

It felt like Erin Morgenstern wrote The Night Circus for the joy of writing but wrote The Starless Sea to try to prove that she’s a Writer. I hate it when authors try so hard to be “literary” that their books just end up being vague and convoluted and flowery.

Ironically, The Starless Sea, a story about stories, didn’t really tell a coherent story because it was show more too busy being fancy.

I should have loved this book. It had a magical library, for crying out loud. I’ll give you another chance, Erin Morgenstern, but may I suggest using a plot arc graphic organizer and perhaps a less highbrow editor next time? show less

The Starless Sea is a wonderfully imaginative world where stories live and are preserved for safekeeping. The starless sea that lives beneath our feet, full of stories, books, and literary wonders is a paradise for storytellers and misfits. Where there is a place for people to find their own story. Something worth preserving and protecting. It's a place of wonder and beauty that only Erin Morgenstern can conjure up and bring to life in so much riveting detail.

Told through interwoven stories that are all the same story. An endless cycle of the same story playing out over and over again, different characters, different settings, but ultimately the same story. There's a mystery of secret societies and symbols. A never-ending love story. A show more thriller with deadly consequences. And finally, a procedural that puts it all together. The story is actually kind of a mess. For long stretches both the characters of the books are confused in time and by elements within the story. So is the reader. It's ok for the characters to be confused, for the symbology to not make sense, and for the events not fit linearly. In fact, that is an element for good storytelling. It's bad storytelling for the reader to be just as confused. There needs to be a common overarching thread for the reader to follow, one that helps fill in the questions being asked. Morgenstern does provide one but waits until that last ¼ for the puzzle pieces to beginning fitting together. There's a lot of action in between for us all to be lost in, I'm still not entirely sure if some of it makes sense. It would have been tighter and stronger if the procedural bit started about half-way through the book and bits of the larger picture were fitted together sooner. It would have made sense of the antagonist and why the starless sea was falling apart, why it keeps persisting. It would have also helped the story come to a more satisfying conclusion or at least giving the ending a bit more of a punch than it did.

Despite its glaring storytelling flaws I still loved it. I loved the atmosphere. I loved the world-building. I loved Morgemsterns approach to interwoven stories and underlining thesis; that all stories are the same story, and yet they are all different. I don't I guess I am forgiving, even if it didn't come together as I hoped. show less

“A boy at the beginning of the story has no way of knowing that the story has begun.”

The writing is beautiful and exquisite, and I was grateful for the images it kept putting in my head. It was like spending hours in a fairy tale art museum.

Compared to The Night Circus, this book has more plot and characters that feel more like real people (even when they are metaphors or ideas ;) ). I was on board for that. The magic here is darker, more fragile, flickering like a candle flame.

There are lots of things to love here: books and reading, finding amazing dreamlike places behind hidden doors, mysterious books, stories within stories within stories within stories. I also had several cozy bookish moments: one of the characters borrows The show more Little Stranger from the library, and my GR friends had been reading that book; someone picks Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell off a shelf – it’s not named, but the description tells you what book it is; there is a parliament of owls (a real one, the owls make decisions), and I’ve recently read a book called The Parliament, with lots of owls in it. What is all this, magic? ;)))

There are cats! Lots of cats! “What’s your problem?” he asks the cat. “Meooorwrrror,”, the cat says in hybrid meow-growl implying that it has so many problems it does not even know where to begin.”

I liked Zachary and Dorian. “Dorian smiles and Zachary wonders how you can miss someone’s smile when you’ve only seen it once before.” I did wish for more of Dorian’s backstory. There were just breadcrumbs – the book is long, there was space, so why not?

Stories within stories and the main story didn’t always make sense. The villains didn’t make sense. But I felt it wasn’t really necessary. Lullabies don’t always make sense, right? But you are happy to go to dreamland if the song is right, and if the right person is singing it. This book had all the right songs.

We could have gotten to the end in fewer pages, in less convoluted ways, but the story came together beautifully. show less

There is a fine line between whimsical and dreamy and beautiful and plain confusing. This book was a mix of both.

Half of the chapters are about a guy named Zachary, who ends up in this mysterious realm about stories.
The other half are tiny stories. Most of them feel vaguely like fairy-tales, with an ominous, all-knowing narrator and no names given to the characters.

Which was nice, but halfway into the book it got tiring. “Once there was a girl.” “Once there was a door.” “Zachary Ezra Rawlins does this.” “Zachary Ezra Rawlins sees that.” What does it all mean? Where is this going?
I loved the one chapter fairytales, but it didn’t make for a coherent book.
I really hoped all of this would connect in some grand, poetic show more way, but when the stories finally fall into place at the end of the book, I didn’t care enough about the characters to live up to the many pages of build up that preceded it. show less

Morgenstern, Erin. The Starless Sea. Doubleday, 2019.
Reading the wildly divergent reviews of Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, I thought for a while that she might have done well to include a disclaimer something like Mark Twain’s famous notice at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Certainly, a number of reviewers struggled in vain to find meaning, motive, or plot in it. Others were entranced by the book’s dark and mysterious ambience. It begins with a young man being drawn into a magical underground realm beneath the show more streets of Manhattan. He is attracted to a young man who calls himself Dorian after the character by Oscar Wilde. After that, every element of the novel shouts at us that it is all a self-referential metaphor. It is a book about books, about the writing process, about the endless exploration of one’s own motives and identity. The symbols are mythic (Morgenstern has said she was influenced by reading about the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a child); they are often vaguely Freudian and Jungian. The starless sea is sometimes made of paper, sometimes honey. It is the personal unconscious and also the collective unconscious. Characters construct their personas as they go along and keep running into their animus or shadow. Their lives are constructed like a computer game with different paths through the narrative. Does it all work? For me, not quite. One character says, when he sees a wardrobe he eventually disappears into, that he never really liked the Narnia stories. I get why. Me either. The novel works best when it stays above ground and gives an eerie weirdness to the quotidian world. Four stars just barely. show less

Even in the exhausted and addled-minded state in which I began reading this novel, I knew from the outset that it was brilliance, that it was poetry, that it was magic. A book that opens the world - not this world, but one infinitely more which in turn makes you want to believe and remake this world in its image. Those of us who read Morgenstern’s first novel, The Night Circus, will not be at all surprised that she has once again brought her talents to bear in a new fantasy of epic proportions, but even so she has changed the game again. In the last story we were immersed in a magical circus and a deadly competition, but this time the stakes are even higher as we are set on a quest to uncover the Starless Sea and the story that has show more built it (or was built by it). Morgenstern strays away from a lineal narrative, with chapters spinning circularly amongst a large cast of characters, which may lead to some confusion, but which all works out as much as it possibly can by the finale. By the end of the book we’re left with so much poetry, so much story, and so much wonder that it’s almost impossible to actually sum up the novel and do it justice so I’ll just end this review with a quote: “A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way.” We may not know where we’re going with this story, but we know that if we walk its pages we will get somewhere wonderful. show less