The Starless Sea Review

 One thing about me is that I have FOMO, so I will read almost everything that I see is popular just to see what all the cool people are talking about. 

Morgenstern's prose is magnificent, truly a lyrical experience in the prose. Her sentences are lush, gorgeous and they truly feel like poetry at times. Her writing made me want to purchase a physical copy of this book just so that I could underline them and keep her sentences in my head. However, the problem is that this is not a 600 page epic poem, but a novel. Unfortunately, I found myself getting kind of bored at times. The overall idea is absolutely fantastic, but I wish it had better editing. Shaving off like a third of this book would have made me enjoy it so much more. 

The descriptive nature of the overall story became repetitive after a while. The amount of time the author mentioned bees and honey in the last 100 pages made me start hearing buzzing. 

 I am not a stranger to a novel that does not reveal everything right away and does not over explain the lore to their readers, but if you are going to create a whole new world with its own rules, history and characters, something's gotta give. The author is amazing at setting up the scenery and I could imagine the vastness of this underground world she had created, but at the end I still don't quite understand what all of it was for. I am not of the opinion that every reader's every question has to be answered, but I believe that the author focused so much on making her writing aesthetic that she forgot there should also be a plot, character development and some sort of progress in the overall story. 

Speaking of characters, I was really interested in all of them at the start. However, as the story progressed, they all felt blank. The story is about stories and sometimes, especially in fairy tales and fairy tale adjacent narratives, characters serve as a metaphor or are just there as symbols more than actual characters. There are plenty of characters like that in 'The Starless Sea', which would be fine if the overall lore of the novel was better established and their role clearer.  However, Morgenstern does not do that, leaving the characters to kind of just exist, throw a piece of pretty words that have some meaning, but not really and then leave the main character to deal with whatever he needs to deal with. 

The two main characters do not fare any better. Some of their background is explained, but in what I suppose is an attempt to keep an aura of mystery around them, the reader is left with two empty shells of men. What we know about Zachary and Dorian until the end of the book is so little, I had trouble imagining them. After reading it, I realized it reminded me of those wattpad 'y/n' characters where the whole point is that the reader can insert themselves into the story. For a novel, I expected more of a character development than a collection of stereotypes. There was some attempt to discuss important topics, but they were mentioned so briefly, that they got buried under mountains and mountains of symbolism all throughout the novel. 

I rated this 3/5, because I wanted to be fair. The story is beautiful, but unfortunately it fell far too flat for me to actually enjoy it as much. Morgenstern can bloody write and she can do it well, but I think she needs to find better editors.