What did work for me, deeply and wholesomely and movingly, was the whole affect of the book, its warmth, its helpless love of storytelling and beautiful, polished fables. Morgenstern does build a lovely, haunting, suggestive mythography, but it ends up competing with her narrative in ways that didn't quite work for me. Later on, I kept expecting the story to resolve in a satisfyingly meta way - which it refused to do, instead setting up a straightforward villain and a plot that developed too late in the narrative to encompass the layers and layers of pleasurable mystery.

What did work for me, deeply and wholesomely and movingly, was the whole affect of the book, its warmth, its helpless love of storytelling and beautiful, polished fables.Įarly on, this is exciting, and did indeed succeed in making me feel like I was playing a puzzle game, being guided through a beautiful labyrinth of harbours and honey and bees. Shocked by this, he reads the book compulsively cover to cover, and becomes obsessed with its contents and provenance - as well as possessed by a need to reach the Starless Sea, a mysterious otherworld he failed to enter as a child when he turned away from a painted door. We have a lot in common, and this book is, in many ways, tailored to my tastes so specifically that I found myself feeling almost embarrassed about it - which almost immediately becomes thematically relevant, as Zachary begins reading a misshelved book in his university's library, called Sweet Sorrows, that includes a passage intimately describing a moment from his actual childhood. Zachary Ezra Rollins is a fortune-teller's son, a lover of books and cocktails, a graduate student studying video games, and gay.

While it doesn't entirely succeed on that front, it did succeed in making me feel like I was a child falling into a story again - which is, as the book establishes early on, very close to the same thing. I felt as if I'd read the book because I'd played the game, interacted intimately with the cover art, steeped myself in a loving tribute to the book's atmosphere.Ĭonversely, The Starless Sea is a book that wants to make you feel like you're playing a game - specifically a game like Myst, with puzzles, history, mystery. Curiously, though, I felt as if I had, and even as if I'd enjoyed it - likely, on reflection, through a combination of the gorgeously evocative cover and the fact that it was accompanied by a browser game developed by Failbetter Games, creators of Fallen London. I came to The Starless Sea not having read The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern's fantastically successful 2012 debut. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Starless Sea Author Erin Morgenstern

The starless sea a novel