SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

SciFi/Fantasy Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern: https://t.co/bB5kdLe9qa Short Review: 7 out of 10 (1/3)

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 23, 2020

Short Review (cont): A Meta Fantasy tale of stories, as a grad student finds himself within a book, leading him to a conflict over a library hidden in another dimension, is very readable and solid, but doesn't really lead to much like other books playing with similar tropes (2/3)

— Josh (garik16) (@garik16) January 23, 2020

The Starless Sea is Erin Morgenstern's second novel, after her hit novel The Night Circus (which I haven't read, mind you).  That book's success mean this book had a lot of hype behind it - to the point where the NY Public Library ordered 183 (!) copies of the ebook and there's still a waiting list to take it out.  So yeah, it's a pretty anticipated novel.  It's also, incidentally, yet another book featuring a plot about stories, as well as a library and books within a book....it's a pretty common trope that seems to be catnip for fiction writers and to be fair has resulted in some of my favorite novels.

The Starless Sea doesn't quite live up to those other novels for me.  Its narrative is captivating and the writing never drags or gets boring, but at the end of it all, it failed to really leave me with anything that lasted.  As with most books of this kind, it's very much a tale with a theme about the importance and powers of stories, but it doesn't do anything particularly interesting with that common theme.  The result is a novel that may read really well as you read it, but is pretty forgettable in the end.


----------------------------------------------Plot Summary------------------------------------------------
Zachary Ezra Rawlins, the son of a fortune teller, is a postgrad student with focus on the media of video games.  But while trawling through his college library, he finds a strange book with no title with a number of stories - including the tale of a boy - a son of a fortune teller - finding a painted door and not opening it.  A tale he recognizes at once as that of his own childhood.  Caught off guard, Zachary begins to look at whether the other parts of the book may be true, tales of a "Starless Sea" and the library underground which is guarded by those marked by three symbols: a bee, a sword, and a key.

But Zachary's quest to find the truth of this mystery will take him to places he could never have imagined and to other people and stories of great significance.  But the quest will also take Zachary into a conflict not known to the modern world, a conflict over the story itself, and as Zachary goes deeper and deeper he will find himself on a path of love, heartbreak, and more stories.....until he finds the ending on the Starless Sea.
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The Starless Sea is told in interesting fashion, with the story switching off between the modern day tale of Zachary (and occasionally other modern day characters) with tales within the books found inside the novel itself.  For sanity's sake for this review by the way, I'm going to refer to The Starless Sea as "the novel" while the tales within the novel as "the books" or "the stories."  Each part of the novel is titled after a different book, which is found eventually by Zachary within the narrative.  The novel does a strong job at mixing and matching the two, so that the books and stories within the books are always interesting, and will often have the reader trying to figure out in advance what the stories are really referring to in the overall narrative.

Still, this is overall Zachary's tale as he tries to figure out why he was in the first book and what really is behind the story he once was part of before seeming to choose another path.  Zachary is a solid if unexceptional character - the reader will find it easy to relate to him as Zachary tries to figure things out just as the reader is, and the feelings Zachary gains for the people and things he finds along the way are rather well done.  Still, as Zachary is very much a surrogate for the reader despite being an in-novel character, he's never as fascinating as the Novel is itself as the mysteries unravel and give rise to more and more mysteries.  The rest of the cast is similar - all of the characters are interesting in various ways, but none really stand out overall.

Still, while the mysteries in the novel and the books are written extremely well - and I cannot stress this enough, the writing is extremely well done to captivate your interest throughout - the end result is kind of.....uninspiring?  Like a lot of novels founded on these ideas, The Starless Sea is a tale about the power of storytelling and the importance of same - Zachary's quest is to find a purpose and a story for himself, after feeling like he missed out on his own story as a child.  The antagonists of the novel, to the extent there are any, seek to prevent the novel's story from coming to conclusion, because of what they fear might happen at the end.

It's certainly very meta in how it works, and again it's written very well, but in the end, it just doesn't do much with this idea other than show how it works?  I'm reminded by contrast of Traci Chee's "The Reader" trilogy, which had similar themes about stories (storytelling and reading), the powers of narrative and searching for one's own path, but used such themes to tell a far more nuanced tale in the end with memorable characters along the way.  Perhaps that's the problem here - it's not that this book is bad, and if you haven't read many similar books, you might find this far more memorable.  But in a novel that uses these very common themes, where readers may have come up against them elsewhere, it's a lot harder of a task to pull off, and I don't think The Starless Sea manages.