Reviews with content warning for Fire/Fire injury - The Starless Sea

10/10!!! NO NOTES!!!💖🐰🏴‍☠️⭐️🌊🍯🐝🗝️🗡️ Pass go 5x, build a hotel on Park Place, and collect 1 million dollars!!

This book was fantastic! I purposefully took so long to finish it because I just did not want it to end. I literally cried when I finished it, not only because it was beautiful, but also because it’s over now and I’ll never be able to experience it for the first time again 🥹, and now I have absolutely no idea what to do with myself 😭. Reading The Starless Sea is like reading a jigsaw puzzle. There are all of these stories that you know connect in someway, but you’re unsure how until the very end when you finally see the whole picture. And it’s absolutely stunning🥹.

I will say though if you are a plot girly and like stories with a very forward narrative then this book is NOT for you. However, if you love magic, whimsy, fairytales, myths, stories within stories, a little bit of romance, endings that aren’t really endings, and non-traditional forms of storytelling THIS is the book you’ve waiting for! 🩵🐝🗝️🗡️

Pro tip: I read this book while listening to the “Ambient Dreamscapes” playlist on Spotify and it was the PERFECT ambience for the story. That playlist matches the vibe and tone of this book to a T. In fact, if you told me Ms. Erin Morgenstern herself created that playlist specifically for The Starless Sea I would believe you.👌🏽😊

Content Warnings

badbadwolf's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

redheadorganist's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging mysterious reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

This book has depths I will probably never understand. It was often hard to follow. But it was captivating and left me feeling like I'd experienced something beautiful.

Content Warnings

ksilvio's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging hopeful mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

4.0

Content Warnings

lizziaha's review against another edition

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4.5

I can’t really explain why I rated this book as high as I did. The vibes were immaculate, but I feel like I don’t really understand the plot enough to pass judgment on it.
This book is like A Series of Unfortunate Events for adults. There’s secret societies and schisms and betrayals and replacements and (doomed?) love and loss and a love of stories and reading and knowledge and mystery and improbable events and the thieving of objects and the lengths which people will go to get them back and there’s fortune tellers and literary references and ordinary people and imagined futures and I could go on and on and on.
Despite being the cause of most of my confusion while reading, I enjoyed the way that the stories within this story began to blend, to the point where I as the reader couldn’t quite tell where one story ended and the other began. It was like I was being buried in the story, covered in layer after layer of words. As a lover of stories, this was ideal for me.

Content Warnings

chrisljm's review against another edition

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adventurous mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

The prose for The Starless Sea was very soft and poetic and yet it came off very artificial to me and made the story much more difficult to digest than it had to be. I definitely agree that this book strongly displays a love for fairytales, stories, as well as the telling of stories, but I would be hard-pressed to describe the plot because the main focus is very much on the writing style. Another reason for that would also be due to the novel being so journey-heavy. You spend most of the novel with Zachary on a journey towards an objective that never really gets revealed to readers, and it's page after page of discovery and yet you never really learn anything concrete, not until it starts to conclude. And for this reason, there also isn't much character or relationship development. There is a romance between Zachary and another character, but you never see that development in the pages of the book. The love interest starts off the story already kind of in love with Zachary, they don't spend much time together, and even less time having any sort of conversation, and so I'm not interested in their love because the author never gave me the chance to get emotionally invested in it.

This book is written with fables and short stories interspersed between the main plot of Zachary in modern day, where you later come to find out that everything is connected and somehow leading to Zachary. However I didn't feel like the short stories were weaved into the overarching plot that well, and so my interest in each separate section would fluctuate, and then it just slowly tapered off towards the end.

The writing is beautiful for sure but it felt very empty and lacking.

Content Warnings

aliyachaudhry's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

Content Warnings

theotheleo's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.75

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