Reviews with content warning for Alcohol - The Starless Sea

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The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

55 reviews

uselesspirateraven's review against another edition

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adventurous dark hopeful mysterious medium-paced

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

5.0

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abi_sarah's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious 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? No

4.0

<spoilers>
I enjoyed the development of the relationship between Zachary and Dorian - it was well paced and very well written. The character development of Z was one of the moment gripping parts of the novel, it kept me wanting to read on. I particularly enjoyed the scenes in which Z was at University, it felt very nostalgic to read and the awkward encounters of young adults rang true with my own experiences, making the story very relatable at that stage.

I very much enjoyed the exploration of Zachary’s heritage and the reader’s discovery of his familial history along with him. I enjoyed the (at first) hidden connections between characters which became apparent later in the novel. I love stories where things all link up in the end.

I got a little lost towards the end and genuinely have no idea how they ended up in the Starless Sea?!

I enjoyed the premise of an ocean of honey - it was so improbable, yet still made so believable by the writing. It was an interesting twist which actually contributed a lot more depth to the story than I first thought.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

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hellavaral's review against another edition

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adventurous hopeful mysterious reflective medium-paced

4.0

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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

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talonsontypewriters's review against another edition

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mysterious slow-paced

Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

1.0

So convoluted and dense, and yet I cannot tell you a single concrete meaningful thing about the world, story, or characters. A perfect example of style over substance -- and not even a great style at that, because a million run-ons without a comma in sight (except in splices, i.e. where they're not supposed to be, and god forbid any semicolons or em-dashes) and shallow imagery repeated ad nauseam do not constitute strong, profound writing. Especially when they're surrounded by weak verbs and dry statements; a lot of descriptions start with the classic grammatical expletive "there is/are." If these quirks were only in one section, it might have been fine, but all of the narrators sound virtually identical. Rather than consciously breaking grammatical customs to create some obvious effect or unique voice, then, it reads like unnecessary padding or honest errors.

I can't even comment in depth on the other elements, I feel like, because what little is there gets completely overpowered by the writing. I don't mind purple prose or stylistic experiments, but they need to be supplementing an actually compelling narrative and/or about 70% shorter. Here, though, if you take away the technical frills, you're left with 500 pages' worth of a bunch of scattered concepts that could have been interesting but don't amount to much in execution.

I wasn't super impressed by The Night Circus when I read it either, but I don't remember it being quite this insufferable, so maybe there's some sophomore slump effect going on. Either way, a pretty big disappointment, and irritated me so much at times I would have definitely thrown a physical copy. Honestly, I blame the editor -- if anyone did indeed edit this -- more than Morgenstern, because a good editor might have at least said, "Hey, so if you aren't going to follow a coherent plot or fully flesh out any of your characters, maybe you could at least punctuate your writing so it's readable?" Alas, clearly nothing of the sort happened, and the certain kind of reader I am suffers for it.

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niff_the_nerd's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging mysterious slow-paced

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

4.0

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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.

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