The Starless Sea: Full Review

The Starless Sea is about a grad student named Zachary who finds a book of short stories in which he is one of the characters. This discovery leads him down a rabbit-hole of secret societies, an underground library guarded by opposing factions, and a twisty tale of Fate and Time.

So, let's start with the good. The mystery that is slowly revealed in the first half of the book or so is exciting and fresh. I love the whole "story in a story" trope and this was no exception. The description of the Harbor on the Starless Sea is beautiful and evocative, and the crux of this story – that there is a hidden library of sorts underground, accessible via magical doorways all around the world – is fascinating.

The novel isn't told fully linearly, and there are interludes and fairytales between the chapters of the main plot. I'm not a huge fan of interludes and seemingly unrelated chapters interspersed within a main story (I get impatient), but some of these were more interesting than others and short enough that their interruption of the plot wasn't too frustrating. I enjoyed the first few reveals as you begin to understand how the interludes are relevant to the greater plot.

I think maybe that's where the good ends for me. This book was 200 pages too long. Instead of speeding up when Zachary reaches the Starless Sea, it slows to a crawl. Instead of a steady stream of reveals that keep you engaged, we get denser mysteries and dropped threads. 

It almost feels like Morgenstern was enamored with the idea of "stories within stories" so much that she lost the main thread of the actual story she wanted to tell and didn't bother to go back and clean up the tangents to find it again. 

Pacing and coherence was a big issue. The end dragged on but also felt rushed, as if there hadn't been a clear resolution in mind and Morgenstern just sort of shoehorned something in that felt mysterious and vague and open-ended. Zachary's role in the story of the Starless Sea at the end feels forced – he's meant to solve a problem we don't even know exists until the last couple chapters, and since we have no idea that problem exists we don't know it needs solving, so there's no real sense of anticipation throughout the novel.

On top of all that, the 3rd person omniscient narration keeps us so far from the characters' thoughts and feelings that I found myself not really caring about what happens to any of them. I didn't care about any of the deaths in this novel.

I know three things about Zachary and even less about the inner lives, fears, and desires of any of the other characters. The beginning of the novel seems to promise we'll learn more about Zachary and everyone else, but all characterization is abandoned entirely early on.

Character-building is widely sacrificed in favor of building a world and history that made less sense (and felt less interesting) the more it was explained. Too much of the worldbuilding ended up feeling self-indulgent instead of useful. We spend ages and ages being introduced to the mysteries of the Harbor – the acolytes, the dice, the symbols, the bees – but there's never a payoff. Too little that would be interesting isn't explained, and too much that is explained feels extraneous, repetitive, or boring.

We spend too many pages following Zachary around carefully described hallways where he discovers painstakingly-detailed secret passages that reveal intriguing clues that don't really lead anywhere important. But the details about his tragic relationship that left him too scared to love? That's glossed over in a single paragraph. 

In short, I wish Morgenstern had taken this story and written it in an entirely different way. There was so much awesome potential but it just totally lost my interest. I found myself skimming so many chapters, desperate to get to a point. 

I think you're supposed to feel the journey matters more than the destination in a book like this, and maybe that's why I was left feeling so disappointed. I wanted a great journey, even one that might meander a bit like this one does, but I also really wanted a great destination. The novel promises a grand reveal; after all the mystery, I feel like the reader deserves that. But the book never delivers.

After all the hype around this book and my love for The Night Circus, I spent half this novel wondering if I was missing something. But when I looked up reviews to see how others felt, I found I'm definitely not alone in my ambivalence. The story is beautiful and sprawling and ambitious, but it's also shallow, slow, and lifeless. For a story that revolves around the concept of hearts, it's really missing its own.

Ali