PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksThe effort of reading The Starless Sea is worthwhile (for the most part) if, like me, you enjoy deciphering narrative clues, weaving together story threads, and nodding at metatextual nuggets ... The novel is ambitious in a way that takes it well beyond the scope of The Night Circus (and possibly the expectations or desires of many fantasy readers). If you want someone to tell you a straightforward story, this novel is not going to deliver. And the narrative ambition of the text deserves to be recognized and rewarded. It also engages in some of my favorite metatextual moves: I love a story that’s about telling a story, that’s aware of its own status as narrative, and where the characters recognize their own liminal reality ... Reaching the end of a narrative requires ending the story, and one of the confusing things about The Starless Sea is that the only story that ends is the story of the Starless Sea. At the novel’s conclusion, the characters’ stories are just beginning. But I have to concede that ending with a resurrection, a rebirth, a new beginning, may be the only option if the nature of story is change. Here, again, I turn to the ambitious aims of the novel: it may not have given me all that I wanted, but it did give me something I appreciate.
