Reviews with content warning for Body horror - The Starless Sea

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

Reviews tagging 'Body horror'

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern

10 reviews

book_bunny_22's review against another edition

I didn’t like the pace, the world building style, and the plot development. The characters also did not seem tangible or appealing to me. However I am invested in the plot overall, and the world building.

Content Warnings

celisabeth's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective slow-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

4.75

Imagine a thousand-piece puzzle, but you start out with zero puzzle pieces. You have to wait for new pieces to appear in the box and the process is gradual. You don’t know what image you’re trying to piece together, and the initial puzzle pieces don’t even seem to form one coherent image. You can sense with growing frustration that it’s all supposed to fit, but it’s not quite there just yet. So you keep sifting and trying new combinations, gaining more and more success as new pieces appear.

Sometimes your first predictions are wrong, so you growl under your breath, recalibrate, and try another arrangement. It requires faith, patience, and maybe a glass of wine (ignore this advice if you’re under twenty-one). After a while, you finally understand. It is one cohesive puzzle and not separate entities. It fits. Hallelujah! The electrifying elation you sense while gazing at the finished product isn’t just because you finally comprehend the image. The satisfaction stems from the process, especially the thrill of putting clues together and finding connections between two dissimilar pieces.

Reading The Starless Sea feels like solving that puzzle: It’s a crisscrossing story within a story within a story within a story. Only that fourth story is also somehow the first story, but you don’t realize it because the initial appearance is different. Oh, and there’s also an eleventh story that somehow intertwines the second and seventh story together. Now multiply that by infinity. Forget eight years — I’m shocked it didn’t take Morgenstern a quarter of a century to type out a first draft.

Content Warnings