Which tells you absolutely everything you need to know about books, writing, novels, reviews, and art in general.īooks are subjective. It felt like this what stories were reaching for, striving for, during all of these years of modern fantasy. It felt like reaching a golden city on a hill after decades of reading works leading up to this point.

Finding this book, for me, was like finally reaching Cair Paravel. I’ve been reading tons of good work all year, really good work, but I’ve also been reading what feels like a lot of fluff compared to the sheer magnitude of imagination and world-building and realized dreams that is THE STARLESS SEA. “It’s a profoundly strange thing-to feel as though you are wading through mildly entertaining novels that pass through you like falling smoke, always searching for the one that reaches into the back alleys of your soul and settles to the bottom of you like fallen leaves.Īnd then there it is, like a faint spark bobbing on a dark sea, calling you, beckoning.” It’s difficult to sum up a novel that has made a home in your heart and mind and will reside there for a lifetime.Īnd then this is the one which actually sums up the way I’m feeling right now: This is the kind of book that comes along once in a decade. The writing is so abstract that I couldn’t take it anymore! Here are some of my favorite lines from GoodReads: This is a librarian romance.Īnd it’s an absolutely polarizing read, apparently! This is a story about stories, and it is all the more charming and delicious for readers who find the references and love notes to the stories which have come before, both within and without its pages.

THE STARLESS SEA has a love story, but it’s not the only story… and it doesn’t show up until deep within the book.

How else to explain some of the exceedingly bad romance novels out there (mine might be included, depending on how you feel about them)? Naturally writing like that has its detractors (many) but THE NIGHT CIRCUS got a pass from so many because it’s also an absolutely gorgeous, haunting love story, and the desire to see the guy get the girl propels many a page-turn when someone might have tossed the book aside otherwise.

Under the starless sea