The Starless Sea, a Review
2.5 stars
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern begins in an enchanting way that had me hooked ... before it collapses as soon as the actual "quest" (word used deliberately) begins. It is one of the slowest books I've ever read. I do not mind slow. But there was no payoff whatsoever. A book more focused on the aesthetic of "reading and stories" than the actual reading and story part. A book with so much potential I'm left more disappointed than usual.
This review will contain spoilers for the entire book. Please read if you have already read (or attempted to read) this book—or if you want to save yourself the same disappointment I'm experiencing now.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins begins this book by finding another book in the dimly lit fiction section of his university's library. It does not have an author, and it is not even catalogued in the system correctly. It is titled Sweet Sorrows.
Three chapters of Sweet Sorrows actually begins the book, but all of Zachary's chapters begin with his name exactly as I wrote it up there, so I couldn't resist. (There are a few exceptions to this rule, which I note down later.) Sweet Sorrows itself says it is miscategorized as fiction in Zachary's library because it is mostly true, and the other parts are "true enough". One chapter begins with the story of a pirate and a girl, later to become recurring characters but only briefly; an odd thing that the narration says over and over about the pirate is that he is "just a metaphor." After completing the book and learning of his and the girl's identity, I am actually struggling to figure out what the metaphor actually is. To be frank, I don't think if you say "this is a metaphor!" it counts as a metaphor at all.
Zachary, the son of a fortune teller and an emerging media student whose primary focus is on video games, takes the book home and reads it, and when he does, he realizes one of the chapters is about him when he was a child: A boy in an alleyway who sees a painted door that looks to be real, but he does not want to be disappointed by the idea it probably, most likely is fake, so he does not open it (not yet). The next day, the door is gone. The chapter ends with not yet, and Zachary becomes obsessed.
This obsession leads him to Manhattan, where a masquerade is taking place, because pictures from last year show a woman wearing a bee, key, and sword charm, which are all big things in Sweet Sorrows. There he meets Mirabel, dressed as Max from Where the Wild Things Are, and is subsequently whisked away into a dark room where a storyteller tells him a tale about fate falling in love with time. After the party, he meets with the storyteller, who says his name is Dorian.
Dorian entreats Zachary to steal a book from a "Collector's Club" in return for Sweet Sorrows. Zachary does so, because this book means a lot to him already, and is nearly caught by a woman in a fur coat named Allegra.
After retrieving the book, the pair hurry to Central Park where there awaits a door, much like the one Zachary saw as a child but cruder. It opens to a candlelit cavern. Zachary is pushed in by Dorian, who is caught by Allegra's henchmen, and the door closes.
It is at this point the narrative begins to fall apart.
In between these "Zachara Ezra Rawlins..." chapters are, shall we say, "side quests," that are either chapters from Sweet Sorrows, chapters from Fortunes & Fables (Dorian's book), or tell of "another place, another time." There are many of these sorts of chapters, and I loved them. I would get several of them in a row and roll my eyes when we got back to Zachary. I realized I was much, much more interested in the fairytales than whatever it was Zachary was doing. In contrast to the "side quests," Zachary's chapters were slow. Incredibly slow. A slog to get through. So little happened in them even 30% of the way into the book.
And then the "side quests" all but disappeared. There would be one Zachary chapter and one side story, then a Zachary chapter, and so on. Seeing as I still liked these side stories more, I almost DNF'd it. But the book was still promising and I thought, "Maybe it picks up now and is just getting rid of distractions."
It never picks up. Not even in the climax does it pick up. Zachary's chapters are still a slog to get through. With every one of them, I miss Sweet Sorrows. It certainly was a choice, and not a good one, to pack tons and tons of these in the beginning when Morgenstern could have easily spaced them out more without sacrificing any narrative. It would have made the middle parts a lot easier to read.
When Zachary gets to the titular Starless Sea, Dorian is not with him and neither is Mirabel. He meets the Keeper and some cats and the "kitchen," which grants him any food item and even launders his clothes. At some point he tells the kitchen he loves them, and they respond positively. He does some exploring but honestly I can't remember too much of it because it was very boring.
I want to note an important observation: The way this book is written, stylized, and presented feels like a Dungeons and Dragons campaign that didn't translate to the page well. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, since there is a minor focus on video games and branching narratives due to Zachary's major and interests. At the same time, this book reads like someone who has never played D&D, or a video game, in their life, opting instead to skim Wikipedia articles. Either way, it is not pulled off very well, and the book suffers for it.
This also presents itself in the prose. Much of the story is told by solitary characters, and so much of the narration is them interacting with the environment. But so much of the environment is set up like a puzzle meant for a party of three or four to solve.
When Zachary is in the Collector's Club stealing Fortunes & Fables for Dorian, he has to figure out how to drop the glass case around the book. He does this by experimenting with the room in a way that takes twenty in-real-life minutes of my time: First he finds light switches. There are a bunch, so for some reason, he chooses one at random. This disengages one of the nearby glass cases. Turning it back on, the glass case reinstates itself. Then he chooses another switch and finds it is for his target, but forgets to replace the book with another one, so the glass case doesn't go back up. Then he remembers. So he goes back and replaces the book and then back to the light switch and it goes back up and it's fine.
That was just a quick summary of the situation but that moment, early on in the book, was the first time I started thinking it would have been better as a D&D campaign. There were many other moments of "exploration" where I thought the same.
Exploration, or even solo time, is not bad in a book, obviously. But these were definitely puzzles I would have written into my campaigns as a DM.
A lot of other reviews praise the prose and say that is pretty much all that is going for the book (besides its lost potential). I have to disagree. Much of the prose is very lackluster. It's very "tell, not show". Rooms are described in both great detail and no detail at all, at the same time. I believe people are mistaking good prose with "a lot of descriptions," because the descriptions are so simple. Things like "her dress was frozen, and the train appeared like waves on a sea, and there were frozen miniature boats on the waves," and then the scene would move on. That is a great concept—tell me more! Please!
I feel as if I can count the number of dialogue tags other than "says" or "tells" on one hand. And there are a lot of dialogue tags, even when the readers knows who is speaking. Even when Zachary is alone and he just spoke a paragraph above with a dialogue tag attached. In this regard, Morgenstern treats her readers as stupid. Either that, or she just doesn't know how to effectively use dialogue tags.
She doesn't write dialogue itself very well either. There is an old trick we writers pass along to one another: Say your dialogue aloud so that it sounds natural. Morgenstern was very silent when writing her dialogue. I have never read more stilted, unnatural sentences in my life. Every character speaks the same, too. The only character(s) that seem to speak differently are the Bees at the end, funnily enough. Maybe that's why she added all the dialogue tags! Maybe I would have gotten confused since everyone speaks like one another, and everyone thinks like one another!
I will say, however, that I did enjoy the fantastical narration used in the "side quests." They did feel like fairytales. As soon as we would switch to a more modern point of view, that wonder was lost.
There is no discernible "climax" in this book. There is an ending but it doesn't feel like it's even a part of the story. Many reviewers praise this book as having "no plot, just vibes," but there's very clearly an attempt at a plot that falls through tremendously (and the vibes aren't even that good, to be honest).
At around the 80% mark, we get another point of view. This time, it's excerpts from the secret diary of Kat, Zachary's friend in university. Who hasn't been mentioned since about the 25% point in the book. I honestly forgot she existed. She had not been set up in the beginning as anything more than a prop for Zachary, but now she was being treated like an important character. When the chapter stated it was the diary of "Katrina Hawkins," I actually couldn't think of who that could be.
Prior to these chapters, there's also a chapter with her dropping off Zachary's stuff at his mom's house, maybe right before. It was a very weird chapter. They barely talked about Zachary, who was still missing. Madame Rawlins instead reassured Kat over and over that she had a place to come back to. Since Kat was either bisexual or a lesbian (mentioned once in one of Dorian's very early chapters) (I actually thought she was a well-meaning but capital-S Straight Ally because when someone after a class of hers wants to speak with Zachary, she tells him "she's not trying to hit on you; I said you were orientationally unavailable" which I fully believe no self respecting member of the LGBT would say), I assume she had a bad home life. So the message itself was fine. But there was ... no precedence for this. No build up or even foreshadowing. It felt like a bizarre chapter that didn't fit in at all, like it was included just for the sake of the message, when we were still trying to focus on Zachary not dying and it wasn't even related to the themes of the book.
(Also in this chapter, the few lines we get about Zachary, Madame Rawlins asserts that he isn't dead even though it's been years because she got her fortune read herself once, and this fortune teller told her she would have two sons. Rawlins reasons that Zachary can't be dead because she hasn't met her son in law yet. I don't know. It seemed so weak.)
The romance subplot is bad. Outright. "Which one?" All of them.
Dorian and Zachary spend effectively maybe 48 hours together overall and decide they love one another so much. That they've never truly loved before this. For most of the book, Zachary and Dorian are separated from each other. If they maybe had connections prior to the start, it would have been more believable. But it's not even just lust, which would have been believable. It's full on "we are fated to have met" love. By the 50% mark they were kissing. Then they get separated again. Then Dorian stabs him and kills him. Then Dorian stares at the body for hours and hours until he is rescued by Eleanor from the shores and it's only then he thinks, "Oh wait. I have a beating heart that is magical in nature. I should use this." It's very weird and very forced. I didn't enjoy the dynamic because there really was none.
Take note that the official summary is misleading. It says Dorian has shifting alliances. He doesn't by the time he meets Zachary. He has fully defected from Allegra's Collectors Club. He doesn't even reconsider going back. I was disappointed.
All the other ones are very minor and not really interesting. The Moon and the Innkeeper (I enjoyed this story but not the follow-up). Simon and Eleanor. Time and Fate, who are also the Keeper and Mirabel, who are also the pirate and the girl. I still don't know what the pirate metaphor was about.
The summary states, too, that Zachary is to find his purpose. He really doesn't, to be honest. The ending sucks so bad, I'm not even joking. He's alive then dead, then alive in the dollhouse, then dead again, then alive again. After he's succumbed by the Starless Sea, he doesn't say a single word nor narrate any longer. He has no revelations. Even when he's in the dark faced with scary voices telling him he's all alone and no one cares for him and he's never had any friends, he has no inner thoughts about why these voices would have chosen these things to try and kill him with. He does not reflect on who he is as a person and what he's meant to do. To be honest, he didn't seem to have a problem with his purpose in life before finding Sweet Sorrows either.
But it almost follows through with it. It almost gives him revelations. And one of my biggest gripes is that, when he's close to this revelation, the chapter openings switch from "Zachary Ezra Rawlins..." to "The son of the fortune teller..." which, honestly, made me so mad on Zachary's behalf, and I didn't even really care for him. If he's trying to find his purpose in life, it would have made much more of an impact had these things been swapped. Had 80% of the book described him every chapter only in relation to someone else then switch to using his name, thereby signifying his resolve and pride in himself? That would have been good. But it doesn't. And he doesn't have any revelations, anyway.
The Night Circus has been on my TBR for quite some time, but I haven't gotten around to it yet. I have read that it is better than The Starless Sea, but I don't know if I want to take the chance actually. I picked up The Starless Sea because the audiobook was available from my library and I needed something for commute. It had a premise that would have become a 5 star read with me. But then nothing actually happened nor resolved nor was even fun to read by the end of it.
So, honestly, I think I think I might avoid it. At least for a little while.
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With love, Byleth