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Jan 21, 2020PimaLib_ChristineR rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
The Night Circus came out in 2012 and while many liked it, it reached a cult-like *LOVE* status for many readers, and I was among them. So nearly eight years later, when Morgenstern’s next novel, The Starless Sea, was released, I was waiting with bated breath. Could it live up to The Night Circus? Would it succumb to the sophomore slump? And I’m happy to report that while The Starless Sea has some problems, it hits so many right notes, so many more complex notes, while it maintains the magically atmospheric writing of The Night Circus, that it’s a novel well-worth your time. The Starless Sea is a book to savour slowly, a book for those who love to read; it is Paris after dark, and subtle inside jokes. In other words, The Starless Sea was worth the wait. The novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, an Emerging Media grad student. This means he studies video games and game theory. This is a book about how Zachary finds a book, a door, a friend, and a love. It is also the story of Fate and Time and an underground world of books. It is also the story of Simon and Eleanor and how they find and then lose each other. Mostly, The Starless Sea is a very long love letter to readers. It’s the kind of book I’ll probably buy, even though I love my library, because I want to highlight and make notes in it. In structure the closest thing I can compare it to is Catch-22 with stories inside stories (here literally) and convoluted time lines. There is a lot of writing *about* writing, about what makes a story good, about the transitory nature of printed books, about what it means to love books. At one point Zachary worries, “that who he is, or who he thinks he is, is just a collection of references to other people’s art and he is so focused on story and meaning and structure that he wants his world to have all of it neatly laid out and it never, ever does and he fears it never will.” There are nods that are direct, like the mention of Zachary returning The Shadow of the Wind to the library, to more subtle, like the party he attends at The Algonquin hotel, or his friend Kat’s journal in which she writes “that’s how the light gets in and all that.” And while these are all those references to "other people’s art," they each felt like a secret handshake, an acknowledgment that we’re the readers who find something deep, sweet and affirming in the stories we share.