I was a little worried when I started reading this immediately after reading The Night Circus because the latter was still on my mind, and I knew I was likely to make comparisons, but this is when it became available from the library. I needn’t have worried. The Starless Sea gripped me right from the start.
The novel tells the story of Zachary, a graduate student who finds a book called Sweet Sorrows that has its own stories in it, and one of those stories is from Zachary’s own life. He sets out to learn more about the book and how it’s possible for him to be in it, ultimately meeting up with the other important characters of Maribel and Dorian and discovering that the Starless Sea that Sweet Sorrows describes is real. Interspersed with the main plot of the book are short tales from Sweet Sorrows and tales and snippets from other books and found stories.
The book is very meta throughout, and you learn more and more how all of the various stories and other characters are connected to each other and to Zachary, Maribel, and Dorian. This literary device is most effective at the very beginning of the book, where it’s sort of jarring or surreal, in a way allowing readers to experience what Zachary is experiencing. The connections Morgentstern makes and the way the stories circle back around to each other is clever and cool to witness.
Morgenstern tends to write meandering books that are more about atmosphere than plot. This makes them wonderfully immersive, and her writing is beautiful. However, like The Night Circus, this one also started to lag at one point because there is less of a focus on progressing the plot. Initially I was ok with that, expecting the pace to pick up again and realizing that it’s part of Morgenstern’s style. And it did pick up again, but towards the end it started to drag, and instead of feeling clever, everything just felt confusing. The book could have used some more stringent editing to address some of the slog and also Morgenstern’s too frequent use of comma splices, which was also an issue in The Night Circus. I’m all for breaking grammar rules when it serves a purpose, but there were times in both novels when I had to re-read a sentence because the comma splice made it confusing, and The Starless Sea also sometimes has an issue with lacking commas where they would be helpful.
I also found the romance between two of the characters to be sorely lacking. It was essentially love at first sight. I tried to chalk that up to the fact that the characters had been through some harrowing situations together and were perhaps fated to come together, but it didn’t keep the romance from feeling underdeveloped even as we’re told how important the relationship is. I have no sense of what drew them to each other or why their feelings developed so quickly before they’d spent much time together.
I didn’t love this book the way I did The Night Circus, but I didn’t hate it. I really enjoyed most of it and found it gripping, engaging, immersive, and fun. The last quarter of it just drags it down, and it didn’t quite live up to the expectations it created in me. This is also the kind of book that begs for a re-read, which I will probably do at some point, and maybe that will change my perspective.