Book Review: The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

The Starless Sea is a book about storytelling and contains a variety of interwoven stories. It is a fantasy, a mystery, and a love story. The main character Zachary, the son of a fortune teller, is a book-loving, fiction-reading, video game-playing, graduate student who finds himself in an underground world filled with books, stories, and the Starless Sea. He is led there by clues after recognizing himself in the pages of a mysterious book that he found in the university library. Zachary wants to know who wrote the book Sweet Sorrows and why he is in it.

Zachary enters the underground labyrinth through a mysterious painted door in Central Park. Zachary must complete the story in order to return to his normal life. He wonders how he is supposed to complete a story that he didn’t know he was in. He is accompanied during his underground adventures by Dorian and Mirable, two characters he met at a masquerade party. These adventures include a collector’s club, time travel, painted portals, a ship, and a beating heart. Other characters include an acolyte, a guardian, and a keeper, a collector, a villain, a pirate, and an owl king.

I loved the fantastical underground world of books and stories. I enjoyed some of the side stories. However, it all seemed a bit too overwhelming. I found it challenging to follow all of the stories. I didn’t feel like the stories flowed together well. Some of the stories never came to an end. As a reader, I felt a bit discombobulated.

 If you are into fantasy books and role-playing games, you may enjoy this book. However, if you prefer all the side stories in a book to be neatly tied into the main story and to have what feels like an ending, you may want to pass on this one.

On a 1 to 5 scale, I would personally give this book 2.5 stars. After reading the description of the book from the back cover, I expected to really love this book. The reality of it was, it was not a good fit for me.