#page-turning books

The Starless Sea

by Erin Morgenstern

Fans of The Night Circus rejoice! Imagineer Erin Morgenstern has released her second magical journey into the world of storytelling. The Starless Sea is a book lover’s dream, a storyteller’s story and a reader’s safe harbor. It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma encased in a mystery shrouded in layers and layers of well-crafted narrative.

Morgenstern is such a skilled storyteller that she is of the ilk of wordsmiths I actually resent for not having more published books. Upon reading her literary theatrics, though, it’s easy to see why she doesn’t. These meticulously crafted tales must take years of careful attention and thoughtful planning. This book isn’t one story. It is a whole library. A body of work disguised as a single book.

At its heart, The Starless Sea is a story about a boy who finds a door etched into a wall as a child and wrought with uncertainty, does not reach to open its chalked knob. He spends his life lamenting his tentativeness, always feeling like his story is missing a piece. That is, until he discovers a book. A book with a story in it. A story about a boy, wrought with uncertainty, who does not turn a doorknob. But that is just one facet in this tapestry of a tale.

This is also a story about a pirate sentenced to death and the maiden who rescues him. It’s a story about Fate and Time, about owl kings and forgotten princesses. It’s a story about an orphan boy and a girl who is also a bunny who consummate a relationship outside time. It’s about a secret society and an underground library. It’s a story about the sun and the moon, about broken-hearted knights, a burned dollhouse, about bees and swords and keys, oh, my.

Zachary Ezra Rawlins in the son of a fortune teller. Aforementioned boy at a magical door, he is now a literary graduate student studying media and gaming at a Vermont college. At the school library, he happens upon an unmarked book with no author called Sweet Sorrows. As he reads, he blinks incomprehensibly at its pages as they recount not only the story of a pirate telling a story, but a story that happens to recount his past.

Unseated by this mystery, he starts to investigate the origins of the curious book and discovers that it was part of a much larger donation by an untraceable foundation. He also deciphers a series of symbols from the book: a bee, a sword and a key that lead him down a rabbit hole to a NYC literary ball, happening, as luck would have it, just a few days from now.

So, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, son of the fortune teller, traipses off in the snow, a strapping young man in a suit, on nothing but a hunch.

At the literary ball, a bibliophile costume party cum Sleep No More theatrical experience, Zachary Ezra Rawlins dances with Max, King - or Queen - of the Wild Things. In his quest to find a necklace with a bee, sword and key, he finds himself back in the closet, but this time, with a whiskey handsome storyteller, who whispers the story of Fate and Time, a story that unbeknownst to him, Zachary Ezra Rawlins, is already a part.

Erin Morgenstern’s book is heavily layered and each story subtly shifts the others, expertly interweaving in an intricate tapestry of a tale. Like a document with a dozen carbon copies - each copy bears the ghosted impression of the original though a different color entirely. It is a story about stories, but it’s simultaneously a thesis on how we tell them.

A door to the fantastical and dangerous is waiting behind this cover. Are you daring enough to open it?