I fell in love with the author Erin Morgenstern creative style after I read “The Night Circus.” Worlds with mysterious circuses, grand love affairs and beautiful prose are just my ‘cup of tea’.
The Starless Sea is a magical realism narrative, a newish gene, that has picked up a large following very quickly. Morgenstern is known for master crafting words, and I was stunned at the beauty of some of the sentences I read. yet she can leave you lost in a world of description almost forgetting to tell you the story, (not a mistake she made in The Night Circus.) She has a genuine power to create brand new and original sub-plots, stories within stories, that somehow feel like myth. There is also some amazing queer representation in this book. The main character, Zachary Rawlins, is gay, Huzzah! Unfortunately character development in some of the main characters such as Zachary get a bit limp toward the later half of the book and for such a large book this is bad. The role of the main female lead, Mirabel. She is the immortal representation of Fate, but again she ends up feeling much like a minor one because she was not developed to her full potential. Mirabel had a lot to offer, but the author left her alone after a certain point. She felt simply unfinished.
However, for a fantasy novel this is no let down. For those of us who love to visualize new worlds and inter-dimensional layers there is so much to play with here. If, like me, you enjoy deciphering narrative clues, weaving together story threads, and nodding at metatextual nuggets. Read this book!
Oak Tree and Stars by BlueFalcon1983 