I absolutely loved her first book, and was hesitant to open the covers of this one, unsure if it would deliver in the same way. I was not at all disappointed -- this was gorgeous, delicate, beautiful writing, and a story that completely envelops you from the first line. You will fall into the story and be unable to put this tale down.

Morgenstern's Night Circus is one of my favorite books so I was so excited for her newest novel--but I'm sorry to say this one did not appeal to me. Though this one has lots of imagination, creativity and pages and pages of detailed descriptions of the different rooms and doorways etc. -- but the book is lacking plot, character development, an antagonist and a reason to care about what the characters are doing. I had to force myself to read through this ... hoping for the magic of the first book to come through. I'd say go and read Night Circus if you haven't already and pass on this one.

I really enjoyed a great many things about this book. Characters were fleshed out and the plot was well spaced. Some of the secondary storylines could've used a bit more page space but all in all an enjoyable read!

As the daughter of a librarian, Erin Morgenstern spent a lot of time at libraries. She has vivid memories of the layouts of the two libraries in her Massachusetts hometown of Marshfield. The tiny library not far from where she grew up didn’t look like a library at all — it masqueraded as a house. But the children’s section of the big town library left an even larger impression. Upon entering the building, she would dart to the side, down the stairs, grab a picture book, then plop on the carpeted steps to read. Over the years, the librarians in Morgenstern’s life all blended together as “magical useful people who let [her] have books.”

In Morgenstern’s sophomore novel, "The Starless Sea," protagonist Zachary Ezra Rawlins is also transported to a different world thanks to libraries. By chance, he finds a book in his Vermont college library that somehow describes an encounter from his own childhood that he has never told anyone about. Now he’ll do anything to discover how it got there.

Scouring the internet for clues about the symbols from book’s cover — a sword, a key, and a bee — leads him to a masquerade ball in Manhattan, where he’s offered a choice: Will he follow the instructions from a handsome stranger that have unforeseeable consequences, or will he return to the safety of Vermont and pretend like none of this ever happened? For someone who has always felt like he was missing the chance to be a part of something greater than himself, it hardly feels like a choice at all, but it’s important that he made it. By choosing the unknown, he becomes privy to a secret ancient underground “labyrinthine collection of tunnels and rooms filled with stories.” In other words, a library.

Zachary’s descent to this library (also known as the Harbor of the Starless Sea) is perhaps a nod to some of Morgenstern’s favorite stories from childhood, “Alice's Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll and “The Egypt Game” by Zilpha Keatley Snyder. Zachary is pushed into a painted door rather than falling down a rabbit hole, but he still finds a mysterious vial he has to drink before he can proceed. The influence of “The Egypt Game” is more abstract. Those characters had created their own adventures in their neighborhood, which inspired a young Morgenstern to construct Egyptian temples in the woods behind her house.

Zachary is a graduate student in Emerging Media, which means he procrastinates working on his thesis about video games by reading books. “I knew I wanted him to study something book-related without being an English major,” said Morgenstern. The solution was to have him study something story-related instead. That answer came to her when she played "Dragon Age: Inquisition." This was the first time Morgenstern played a game where the choices a player made mattered to story. “It’s a butterfly effect narrative,” she said. “The stories are personalized depending on different choices. You can’t change direction. People can die.”

“The Starless Sea” is not a choose-your-own-adventure book, but it does wrestle with the theme of free will versus fate. At first, the book’s structure makes the case for a classic hero’s journey spun by mythic destiny. Morgenstern intersperses passages about Zachary Ezra Rawlins with other sections from the book he is mentioned in. Each side story has the familiarity of a fairytale without feeling like a retelling of well-known lore. The reader is left to wonder — if Zachary is real, then which of the other stories might be real, too? If this book was written before Zachary was even born, does he have control over his own actions?

The book confirms something Zachary has long suspected, which is that “he was given something extraordinary and he let the opportunity slip from his fingers,” which clues the reader in that he could walk away if he wanted to. But for readers like Zachary who had searched their wardrobes for Narnia or dutifully awaited their Hogwarts letters, realizing they had unknowingly passed up the opportunity to pursue a Library of Alexandria as old as time would be their worst nightmare. Thankfully, Zachary gets a second chance to unlock that door to a world of imagination and possibilities, only to discover the Starless Sea is in grave danger.

The interlocking chapters of fairytale-like backstory and modern hero’s journey are a labyrinth in themselves. This is reflective of Morgenstern’s writing process. She admitted that she is “not an outliner,” so she will find the story she wants to tell by writing different iterations, backstories, and side stories in bits and pieces. She has to live in that world and explore. The result is a reader’s playground of rich language, seductive settings, and mysterious characters.

Morgenstern learned how to set a scene from her extensive background in theater. She majored in it at Smith College, so she was exposed to a little bit of everything. She acted, she stage managed, she directed, she studied lighting design. By doing in depth scene studies over half a semester, she learned how to dig deep into characters like Hamlet. Through directing an adaptation of “Through the Looking Glass,” she learned how to construct an ensemble piece. And by constructing the lighting in a given setting, she learned how to establish mood in a way that most authors would overlook.

The biggest difference between books and theater for Morgenstern is the decision-making process. In any theater situation, there is always collaboration between actors, designers, directors, and more. For writing, Morgenstern takes on all of those roles herself, “which takes a lot longer to write and rewrite until it’s book-shaped.” She’ll write draft after draft until she gets to the point where she’s emotionally ready to let the story go, and that’s how she knows she has her ending. She attributes this to the Leonardo da Vinci quote, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Morgenstern started writing her debut novel, “The Night Circus,” when she didn’t know what next step she should take in theater. She knew she liked writing from playwriting and creating dialogue, but when she sat down to write in brief spurts of page or two at a time, she would quickly hate what she had written and stop before it got much further. National Novel Writing Month turned out to be exactly what she needed to get 50,000 words on the page in 30 days, so she could get over the hurdle of getting something finished. “I had to write everything wrong before I got it right.”

After “The Night Circus” did better than Morgenstern “ever could have dreamed,” it gave her a “slight” confidence boost. “You never feel like you know what you’re doing,” she said. But when the pressure to write another book was mounting and a few projects didn’t pan out, she thought about why she wanted to write another book. “I was writing an analysis about why I was writing in the first place,” she said. Then she came across an idea in her notebook about underground library, and it clicked. It was a space she wanted to play in, a world she wanted to explore. Now she has created a book about stories for the next generation to curl up on their library stairs and let themselves be transported to a world of wonder.

I had SO much trouble even finishing this. It felt so disjointed and just weird. In my opinion, the story just did not work.. I could not connect with any of the characters. And what the heck was going on? I feel bad that I did not like this, since I loved The Night Circus so much and since it is billed as a love letter to books and libraries and reading, but I really didn’t. Ah well.

I seriously wanted to like this book. I even nominated it for Library Reads before even starting it. I thought it was going to be the perfect story for me. But I really struggled to get through it. I ended up giving up on it at the half way point. Maybe I will try it again some day but right now it did not do anything for me.

I'm not really sure what I just read, but it was beautiful, magical, and epic. I feel like I should read it again because there were so many interwoven details and elements, that I'm sure I missed something important along the way. The symbolism and intertwined stories kept me glued to the pages. This was a masterpiece. Highly recommended.

A very different read to The Night Circus, while still retaining everything I loved about it. The story is stranger, but the main character seems more real, and the setting in general is much more closely linked to our world than Morgenstern's previous work. While not a quick read, there was definitely a moment where I was dismayed to see how close I was to the end.

One thing I would definitely recommend is reading it in a physical format, as the story makes deliberate use of a bookish structure. I am looking forward to doing so myself, as I bought a copy immediately after finishing the digital version.

I received an advanced copy of this title via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
To begin with this book is NOTHING like The Night Circus. However, Morgenstern doesn't completely turn away from the elements that made that book great. This book is fantastical in both a positive and negative sense. I found it a bit disconcerting and abstract at times. It is original in its overlapping of stories and the use of time and space throughout the book. It left me both satisfied with its depth but yet troubled by its waywardness.

I received this book as an eARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

When I heard that Erin Morgenstern was putting out a new book after 8 years, I was absolutely thrilled. I love [book:The Night Circus|9361589] and have read it several times since it came out.

<i>The Starless Sea</i> was definitely written by the same author. The ethereal writing style that made the circus pop into life was present here, but I felt like I was missing something throughout the whole book. It felt like there was something just out of my grasp, something I could see out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned to look at it, it disappeared.

The novel follows Zachary Ezra Rawlins, as he stumbles upon a book hidden in the stacks of his grad school. It has little history in the catalog, but it intrigues Zachary. He convinces his friend, who is a student librarian, to let him check it out and takes it to his dorm room. Once he delves into the story, he realizes that some of the pages talk about a starless sea and... him. When he was a child, he happened upon a door painted onto a wall near his house; it was so realistic that he felt like he could reach out and touch the doorknob and he almost did, but then.. he didn't and his life went on.

Consumed by the mystery of where this book originated from, Zachary finds himself traveling to a masquerade party in New York City where he falls further down the rabbit hole to find out why a particular and secret part of his childhood had been published in a book before he was even born.

As with <i>The Night Circus</i>, nearly every chapter starts with a scene that partially connects to the story, but doesn't really. In her first book, Morgenstern talked about the different rides and exhibits that arrived in the circus and they all neatly tied into one another at the end. She goes down this route again in her second book, but I feel like some of them missed the mark. Perhaps I just didn't find those connections because it seemed so metaphorical, almost like Morgenstern was trying to recreate the magic and flavor of her debut novel, but added a little too much of this spice or too few of that one.

Overall, I feel like the novel had an open ending, which was dissatisfying after following Zachary down the labyrinth to find the starless sea. I do feel like I will read the book again (or maybe listen to it) to see if maybe I just wasn't in the right mood for it.

The Starless Sea is a brilliantly imaginative follow up to Morgenstern's debut The Night Circus. Readers will be enthralled from the first pages!

I have very mixed emotions about this book. I am a very big fan of The Night Circus, and found much of Morgenstern's highly original creativity and sense of wonder here, but the story was so complex that it completely shattered the narrative. It all comes together in the end... sort of... but getting there is a bit of a slog. Obviously other readers disagree, but I did not find myself called back to the book like I was to Night Circus.
There is no way to explain the story, er, stories really. Many stories, all relevant. Many characters, all relevant. Many time periods, yes, all relevant. An amazing amount of content, tremendously inventive and quite beautiful. Just not particularly gripping.
My copy was an ARC from NetGalley

I've been waiting eagerly for Erin Morgenstern's next work - The Night Circus is one of my very favorite books. Now I can add the Starless Sea - it was well worth the wait. In the Starless Sea, a young grad student, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, recalls finding a door when he was a boy, something he'd forgotten until a mysterious book shows up. The title is Sweet Sorrows and it is the story of his life.so far. Of course he wants to know more. He soon becomes embroiled in a mysterious plot that involves a pink-haired woman he calls Max (she calls him Ezra), and a well dressed but barefoot man called Dorian. Ezra finds himself in a world of doors and keys and books, always books. After he escapes a secret club where he stole a book for Dorian, he's shoved through a recently painted door in the middle of Central Park and enters a vast underground library (sounds like heaven to me!) Max finally finds him and returns him to the "real" world. He meets different factions of Guards who want to keep the libraries secret and people like Max and Dorian who don't.

Morganstern writes in a dreamy, magical style similar to Alice Hoffman. The story is interspersed with actual tales, involving Fate and Time, Sun and Moon, stories of love and loss, magical tools and books. People of all ages will like this - I look forward to giving the Starless Sea to my bookish friends!

Young Zachary Ezra Rawlins is walking through the city one day and sees a door painted on a wall that is highly susceptible to graffiti. The painting is so detailed, it looks as though he could reach the doorknob and open the door. He considers it, then convinces himself to keep walking. The next day, the painted door is gone.

Years later, Zachary is now in his twenties, in grad school. He frequents the university library and stumbles upon a strange book that isn’t properly catalogued. As he begins to read, this exact scene from his childhood is written on the pages of a book much older than he is. Following his curiosity, Zachary soon finds himself in the world of the story again. He is presented with many more doors, but now he chooses to see where they lead. It may be a fairy tale, but it is deadly serious.

The Starless Sea flows through a universe where magic exists, and nothing is more magical than the feeling of being swept up in a good story. Zachary journeys on, navigating secret societies, magical portals, dark rituals, underground mazes, puzzles, keys, swords, romances that defy space and time, several cats and too many owls all in service of the story. Which story? There are so many stories. They are all the same story.

If this sounds confusing, just ride the wave. While fans of The Night Circus should definitely read this novel, it is disorienting. There are a lot of cocktails mentioned in this book, and frankly I felt a little inebriated and seasick while I stumbled through it. It can be maddening at times, but ultimately it is worth it. The Starless Sea delivers magic, atmosphere, and romance almost more than plot, though few novels could be said to have more plots than this one. It is a feat of Morgenstern’s writing and our own reading to unravel them all.

“Sorry it’s so poetry today,”
“So what?” Zachary asks, not certain he heard her correctly.
“Poetry,” Mirabel repeats. “The weather. It’s like a poem. Where each word is more than one thing at once and everything’s a metaphor. The meaning condensed into rhythm and sound and the spaces between sentences. It’s all intense and sharp, like the cold and the wind.”
“You could just say it’s cold out.”
“I could.” (p.156)
Erin Morgenstern’s long-awaited and much anticipated second novel follows a young graduate student that stumbles into a world of secret literary societies and underground libraries. The Starless Sea is a journey, in every sense of its’ meaning: readers will sometimes not know where they are going or why, but they will have no choice but to continue on, each chapter a new tale in an ever-growing magic that grabs the reader and beguiles them.
We first meet Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a gamer and grad student on the East coast. He finds an interesting book in the library, one that recounts a time that he was posed with a decision to take a chance on the impossible, and did not. That recounting, and the journey that follows, reads much like a children’s fairy tale and a horror novel, both exhilarating and a little bit frightening. Eventually, Zachary is faced with impossibility again, and jumps at the second chance for adventure.
Along the way, Zachary finds friends in a handsome and secretive rogue that appears to help him for no good reason; a pink-haired firecracker of a woman on a mission; and a very strict rule-following Keeper of this underground world of mystery. At every turn, a new character is glimpsed in a new story, and a new story leads to new understanding and always, always more questions than answers.
For most readers expecting something a little or a lot like The Night Circus, they will not find that in The Starless Sea. Where The Night Circus was otherworldly but decidedly familiar all the same, The Starless Sea is dreamlike, hallucinogenic that airs on the side of unsettling. I finished The Starless Sea shortly before coming down with strep throat, and although most of my strange dreams could be chalked up to the illness, I rather think it was The Starless Sea, and its ability to burrow itself in your heart and mind, that lead to some of the strangest and most vivid dreams of my life.
Erin Morgenstern’s previous work has been described like enjoying fine wine or fine art, and both are apt for The Starless Sea. Each new chapter provides new depth and emotion, a tunnel that keeps digging itself into a spiral without a start or end. Readers will relish following Zachary as he adventures with Dorian and Mirabel to save this realm, one of wonder and magic and uneasy magnificence.

I think this will be a very special book for some - probably many - people, but it just wasn't for me. The premise seemed as if it would be just my style and the writing felt lovely, but reading it was like I being Alice falling endlessly down the rabbit hole without much to hold on to in terms of character or even significant action, or ending up with much in the way of resolution. (The use of honey felt appropriate considering the way the story moved with such a stretched out, slow quality.) It felt more focused on Nice Writing and metatextually emphasizing the concept of storytelling than actually telling a story with intent, and this led to a disappointing denseness and opacity to the text, at least in my eyes.

"The Starless Sea" is an interesting book. It is hard to say what is good and bad about it, but it generates a hell of a lot of conversations.

This book is incredibly hard to describe, but probably best thought of as a kind of dark fairy tale fever dream with some meta-overtones of describing the act of storytelling, and stories wandering dark bottomless abyssal plains of unfinished tales seeking out-of-time characters like Fate, the Moon, and the Keeper. The bottomless dark depths of the space kind of behind-the-curtain of the uber-Library holds fathomless space and winding caverns, a dark bottomless Starless Sea made of honey and the deepest black, which has risen and receded before stories began as thoughts, which hold parliaments of owls, and busy world-building bees, and countless doors to be lost in, and so many cats. We are given one story arc with a character who stumbles like Alice down a well into this incomprehensible universe, whose story acts as the mechanism to teach us about this place, but chapter to chapter is a bit of a pebble skipping experience that the reader just has to hang onto loosely. If you hold too tight, you lose the thread, which is meant to be more gossamer cobweb than hardened plot device and clear beginning-middle-end. While perhaps not for all, I loved the ambiance of the book, and the cozy, library cave feeling I felt every time I continued to read. While I may not have understood each element, I don’t feel like I needed to. Being inside of this place was enough.

Erin Morgenstern has a one of a kind imagination to be sure. I loved the cats, the kitchen, and the inn-keeper fable. They are now officially tattooed on my soul. There is no question that she knows how to put words together.
However, I'm going to be honest, there was little plot to speak of, and I spent much of the time not knowing what was going on. But alas, I give thee 4 stars.

This book was just... so much. But, in a good way. I'm struggling with how to review it properly. I've only read it once, and I think it deserves at least one re-read in order to even start to examine all that it entails. The several complex, overlapping, intertwining storylines incorporated in the main overarching story necessitate this.

I loved the concept of an underground world of books, stories, secrets, myths. The cats were a nice touch, too, (even though I'm more of a dog person). The honey made me feel thirsty and sticky, but it definitely added to the sensory experience of this title.

And I guess that's one of the things I loved the most about the book - the sensory experience of reading it. Hence my desire to go back and read through it all over, to immerse myself in this intriguing world again and try to figure out more of its mysteries.

Oh, and can someone please come and install a Kitchen in my house? 'Cause that would be awesome.