Back in 2018, I was swept into Erin Morgenstern's magical debut novel The Night Circus. I loved that experience so much that when I found out shortly after finishing it that Morgenstern's sophomore novel had finally been announced (The Night Circus was published in 2011) and would be released in 2019, I immediately added it to my wishlist and I think I even bought it new very shortly after it came out. Which is rare for me, I'll be a secondhand book girl till the day I die. For the amount of books I like to have around me, I'm not rich enough to be out here buying new books unless it's a special occasion or someone gives me a gift card to a bookstore.
I thought for sure I'd read The Starless Sea right away given my enthusiasm surrounding The Night Circus. I figured if it took Erin Morgenstern over seven years to put another book out into the world, it must be an absolute banger. Nevertheless, it sat languishing on my shelves for years, and when 2023 rolled around and I still hadn't read it, I put it on my official book list for that year. Alas, 2023 came and went, and I never picked it up. 2026 has been the year of reading all the books from my past book lists that I never got around to so The Starless Sea got another spot, and in May when Cody and I went to the library in Juneau, Alaska, this is the book I picked up and started reading. I finished it a few weeks after we got home, and I won't keep you in suspense: it was not a joy. As soon as I finish writing this recap, it will be going to a Little Free Library to maybe find someone who will appreciate it.
The Starless Sea is the story of graduate student Zachary Ezra Rawlins who stumbles across a mysterious little book called Sweet Sorrows in his university library. He becomes obsessed with it, especially after reading a story in it about himself...which can't be possible because the book was written long before he was born. It takes him on a series of capers through the streets of New York City and into a fantastical, subterranean world of strange acolytes, ancient libraries, and seas of honey. Keys and swords and bees, oh my.
Yes, Morgenstern was definitely going for a specific Aesthetic™ and I don't feel that she pulled it off. The structure of The Starless Sea is insanely ambitious, trying to interweave bits of fairytales, myths, fables, and legends from other fictional books that the characters within The Starless Sea encounter. It's all very meta and not in a way that was appealing to me. It left me as a reader very confused, and I felt like I was blindly muddling my way through the story, waiting for it all to come together, and it never really did. By the end, I didn't really care what happened to Zachary Ezra Rawlins or the Starless Sea and was just glad to put it behind me and come back out into the light of day. My favorite bits were actually the pieces of fairytales Morgenstern created, particularly about the Moon, but most of those threads were left dangling. The Night Circus effortlessly swept me away: The Starless Sea clubbed me over the head with repeated imagery that didn't really serve any kind of meaningful story. It just wasn't for me. I'm inclined to agree with Lindsay Faye who writing for the New York Times book review said, "It's impossible to settle in without being bludgeoned by mystique." She found the novel crippled by "numbingly vague expostulation" and "pseudo-philosophical sentences".
I couldn't have put it better myself, Ms. Faye.
I also thought Adrienne Martini writing for Locus Magazine cut through all the mistiness of The Starless Sea nicely when she said, "Like any story, The Starless Sea has a beginning and an ending. It also has a middle—a lot of middle. Morgenstern crams about a billion ideas—including but not limited to game design, folk tales, cocktails, and bees—into the endless-feeling middle. Some of them open her tale in interesting ways; some don't live up to their promises. She takes a big, admirable swing but doesn't completely connect. Still, it's a book full of beautiful moments, even if they don't all work in concert."
Ultimately, it's not a book I'd recommend and I won't be on the lookout for any more of Morgenstern's work. But you can bet I'll be ready to dive back into The Night Circus some wintry night in the future and get lost in her magical black and white tents for a spell.
Were you ever looking forward to a new release only to be massively let down when you finally read it?
No comments:
Post a Comment