“Don’t you wish you were here?”
With a pandemic ravaging every corner of the globe, I believe it is more important than ever to find an escape hatch, in reality, to seek out a pleasant corner and while away the hours inside a story. And there isn’t a better one that I can think of.
“The House in the Cerulean Sea” is nonstop entertainment. It flooded every corner of my mind with delight and warmth, reassuring and nourishing me in channels of my heart that had been scraped dry for weeks. It’s a feeling I wish I could bottle and carry with me through the night.
The novel’s premise is as straightforward as it is full of comedic potential. Linus Baker, a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youths (DICOMY), has the appearance of someone uptight. His job is like a millstone, all weight and no warmth: investigate orphanages that house magical children, then write a report advocating for the continuation or discontinuation of the said orphanage. Linus Baker, you see, walks through life like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds: he has a routine, rules he follows with stony rigidity, and a comfort zone he’s sealed himself inside. Linus’ world opens up when he is assigned to investigate an island orphanage for magical children deemed especially dangerous.
Arthur and the magical children who came to him with tragedies already packed in their suitcases have something vital and wondrous about them, and Linus Baker is the human polar opposite of vitality and wonder. Linus becomes acutely, achingly aware of the empty place at his centre during his stay in the Cerulean sea house, and begins to ponder the grim march of the life he’d live. At the beliefs, he’d clung to and the rules he’d dutifully followed but never looked in the eyes. At a life that once seemed perfect, but now pinches like a pair of tight shoes.
TJ Klune wears his heart on his sleeve, and it makes “The House in the Cerulean Sea” that much better. The novel is lively, exquisitely crafted, and exhilarating. It’s brimming with quirkiness and playful detail, and the dialogue positively fizzes.
However, it is the cast of tenderly realized characters who carry the film.
― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea
The relationships here have an undeniably unconditional quality, and it moved my heart. Klune’s cast of characters is enthralling. Despite the sadness that haunts his eyes, Arthur’s lightness of heart is contagious: he is a study in kindness, made of such a steadfast and dependable fiber.
His magical children are as erratic and colorful as Linus is restrained and monochromatic, and together they formed something resembling the word “family,” disappearing into one another like partially shuffled cards and rubbing their rough edges smooth against each other.
I can’t tell you how much I enjoy stories about people who don’t believe that blood makes a family, but that kin is the circle you form with your hands clasped tightly. Linus, Arthur, and the children couldn’t have been more dissimilar, but they all had the same desperate wish in their hearts: to be seen, to be loved, to reach, and to be reached for. And as they all moved tremblingly one step along the road between unknown and familiar. I found myself wishing for them—for that house in the Cerulean sea, away from malice and a happily-ever-after.
But, as entertaining and unrelentingly entertaining as “The House in the Cerulean Sea” is, it’s easy to overlook the fact that it’s also calmly, intelligently damning, and full of difficult questions about difference, prejudice, and complacency.
The novel deftly carves out the numerous ways in which we see and do not see our own world and the people around us. It calls into question our proclivity to categorize people in order to make them easier to understand, to fall into neatly received misconceptions and stereotypes in order to avoid the discomfort of confronting our own ignorance, our shame.
Regardless of how grim the novel’s resonance with reality is, “The House in the Cerulean Sea” is always leavened with hope. It is aware of hatred, but it also believes in people. It is, at its heart, a joyful celebration of the nondiscriminatory nature of love, thoughtfully exploring not only its rewards but also its risks, and a reminder of the extraordinary power of a simple gift like kindness.
Overall, “The House in the Cerulean Sea” is a cracking, endearing novel, and I’m hoping for a sequel. In fact, the novel’s only disappointment is that it is a stand-alone and that there will be no more books set in this fantastic world.
