TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea was a fantastic success when it came out during the pandemic. A New York Times, USA Today, and Washington Post bestseller when the whole world was looking for feel-good escapism, it also came out as a queer-positive book in the crossover YA, Harry Potter niche just as J.K. Rowling was alienating that whole community.

In the few years since, Klune has written other novels and, though some of them have even become bestsellers, none have quite scaled the heights of what the publishers now tout as book 1 of the Cerulean Chronicles. Published on Sept 10, book 2 from that series, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, intends to extend that legacy.

This book gives all the feels. It's full of righteous anger at the mistreatment of magical children and adults, and brings hope when all seems lost.

Set this time from the POV of Arthur Parnassus instead of Linus Baker, we get to see his love for all of their children and Linus, which was such a treat. The children being slightly more grown up, but not too much as the book is a few weeks to months at most after the conclusion in The House in the Cerulean Sea, they are the most creative and devious minds at work.

I'm in the midst of setting up an interview with TJ to cover this book on my podcast, Novel Finds.

Rating: 4.75 stars
It was so wonderful to be back in this world. I adore these characters so much and I've been waiting to see what this book had in store for them since Klune teased the possibility of a sequel several years ago. I didn't like this one as much as Cerulean Sea (or Klune's other books like Under the Whispering Door or In the Lives of Puppets), which isn't saying much considering it's still sitting at just under 5 stars. At its heart, Somewhere Beyond the Sea is about healing. It's about looking at a hostile world ,finding safe places, and doing whatever you can to survive in that world. The missing .25 star is because this one is more heavy-handed than the others. This is a reasonable outward progression from the first one, but some of it felt almost too real and too heavy. As a queer person, I already knew all of it, so it almost felt like this book was campaigning to a non-queer audience. This isn't to say I didn't still cry, because I did. I cried four separate times in the excerpt chapters and then several more times throughout the rest of the book. I'm happy with where this one leaves our favorite weird family, but I wouldn't be upset if Klune wanted to write a nonsense short story collection about them. :)