While wandering the university library one day, Zachary Ezra Rawlins stumbles across a book with no author. Opening it up, he finds it’s a book of short stories and as he reads, he realizes he’s reading a story about himself when he was a child. Determined to find out how this book is telling his story, he sets off on a quest that leads him to an underground library, painted doors, owl kings, magic, and a man lost in time.
What can I say about this book? This book is a love letter to storytelling. The writing and imagery are beautiful and poetic and Erin Morgenstern sure does have a way with words. I could see everything she was describing in my head and I was filled with magnificent illustrations of bees and paper towns and cats and books.
But while all the magic and images were spectacular, it was almost too fantastical at times.
The storytelling is fragmented. The main plot involving Zachary is broken up with alternate chapters of short stories/fairy tales and, at the end, excerpts from a journal of a secondary character. The short stories kept taking me out of the main story involving Zachary and I kept getting confused and when I would come back to Zachary’s chapters I would forget what had happened. I tried just skipping chapters and only reading the chapters involving Zachary but in the end Zachary’s storyline and the short stories kind of relate together so by not reading the short stories I was missing information. I ultimately decided to just read every chapter in order and hope to figure it out, Let me just say, there was a lot of flipping of pages back and forth.
There’s a lot to follow with Zachary’s story and then all these other side stories and I found it difficult to keep track of everyone and all the symbolism and what everyone’s plotline was. After I finished the book, I ended up going back and rereading a lot to try to figure what exactly happened and who everyone was.
This book is the author’s second book, after her debut The Night Circus. I haven’t read The Night Circus (mainly because I find circuses to be just a bit creepy) so I can’t say if you liked The Night Circus that you will like this book or that the books are anything like one another.
The Starless Sea was filled with spirited prose and pretty descriptions, but I think this is a book that you have to read many times to comprehend everything. And the worst part is, that even after rereading a lot of the book, I still don’t really understand what the plot was supposed to be or how it ended.
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