The characters in this are not the most fleshed out characters I have ever read, they don’t feel explicitly complex, yet all of them feel real. I think it’s hard as this does’t read as a modern novel, but rather a new fairytale in modern form – and how are we meant to critically review fairytales? This is a rather strange review to write as everytime I try to put something down I instead write some review full of ‘poetic’ nonsense, none of it is useful for a review, which is not what you came here to read. I went into this not expecting to love it as I didn’t love ‘The Night Circus’, but Morgenstern certainly proved to me they’re an exceptionally talented writer who deserves to be regarded as a great author. It’s not very often that a book comes along and touches me in a way that I can’t explain, when the feelings it has provoked are impossible to put down on paper in any elegant way, and this was a book that did that for me. When the words on the pages become so precious that they feel like part of your own history because they are’

The symbols in the book lead him to two strangers, Mirabel and Dorian, and they lead him into their world of romance and mystery and maybe a place worth dying for as a battle rages over it’s fate. Zachary is unknowingly searching for his doorway, and drawn by a feeling he can’t explain he picks up a book in his university library that tells impossible stories, including a story of his childhood that’s written in a book older than him. The doorways to this place are often hidden in plain sight, but those who seek it will find these doors as the doors have been waiting for them. The book currently has an average rating of 3.87 on Goodreads and I have rated it 5 stars.įar beneath the surface of the Earth there is a starless sea, and on it’s shore a labyrinth library full of books and stories from the ages.

‘The Starless Sea’ by Erin Morgenstern is a fantasy novel that reads largely like a modern fairytale, and the book plays off this idea largely with it’s symbolism and in the way that it is written.

The starless sea genre