This was a gift from last year’s book exchange, and while I finished it a while back, I think I put off reviewing it because I prioritised all the Hugo works for Bingo instead; I had a harder time fitting this into my scorecard calculus! What this did mean though is that I had some extra time to read through a second time around. And would you believe it was even more wonderful the second time?
At the start of The House in the Cerulean Sea, you have to feel a little sorry for Linus Baker. His life is not a lively one. The poor man works as a pencil pusher for a government department, and this seems to be slowly sapping the life out of him. Bureaucracy is a drag, and the way TJ Klune writes about the slow monotonous routine of Linus’ day-to-day routine and the banal yet slightly cruel antics of his superiors puts me on the mind of a mild-mannered mish-mash of Charlie Stross and Monty Python. (Which is really funny in a way—I was so convinced TJ Klune was British as a result of this. He is not!)
But you can’t write a whole novel based on this degree of dreariness—you would put your readership to sleep. So we find that Linus’ life gets upended after a summons from the Extremely Upper Management. Linus’ dreary employer is the Department in Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY); the arm of the government that looks after the needs of orphaned and abandoned magical children. And it turns out, Very Upper Management has taken notice of Linus’ professional yet unattached manner. This leads to Linus being sent on a month-long assignment to Marsyas Island to inspect an orphanage containing six magical children and their carer, Arthur Parnassus.
I am not usually a fan of precocious small children characters, but the children in The House in the Cerulean Sea are all lovely and well drawn out. The book gives you space to get the know the house’s inhabitants, and I was well charmed by them. This also proves to be the case for Linus as well, who starts to feel a certain kinship with the six. But it’s one boy—Lucy— that stands out the most. Not that he can help it, but it just so happens that he is the literal son of Satan and possibly the Antichrist. Now, like Linus, it is easy to assume that it’s Lucy’s presence that triggered Very Upper Management’s investigation. But it slowly becomes evident that Lucy is not the only person on the island some members of Management have an interest in.
Linus’ personal development arc here is delightful. There is nothing more heartwarming than to see this man slowly work out of his shell and connect with the inhabitants of Marsyas Island. There is also a sweet parallel here with the children: feared and distrusted by people on the mainland, they are all trying to unpack themselves from the boxes society has put them in. And throughout the book, it seems Linus slowly starts to realise that he too, has been stuffed into smaller and stuffier social boxes throughout his life and he also has to unpack for his own good.
There are two other things that The House in the Cerulean Sea really charmed me with. The first is the setting, which could be described as mundane in the face of whimsey. Or whimsey in the face of the mundane. This is best seen in the one thing that has been crushing Linus: his dull white-collar job. But it’s a dull job that just so happens to be in a department for observing magical children. In a world of sprites, gnomes and wyverns, we also have a strange, society that seems to pick and choose between different decades of the late 20th century. Computers are commonplace, but mobile phones are not. Several characters are also music fans, but there are no CDs or cassettes in sight—only records. I don’t quite know what Klune was going for here, but I loved it. I really did.
The other thing I really loved was the romantic plotline. This is something that I felt more strongly about the second time because my re-read coincided with my re-watch of a certain rom-com about pirates… and there are certain narrative beats (and little quirks in pacing) that they both share that tugged on my heartstrings*
Again, this was very sweet and lovely, and a very good choice from Bonnie—thank you so much!