Francesca's Thoughts

Happy new year! I’ve been meaning to write about The Starless Sea since I first read it in spring 2021. I began writing this post back then, forgot about it and reread the novel at the end of last year. So. Since it is a cold, rainy January in here Bath and The Starless Sea lends itself to an immersive, blanket-covered deep reading session with a delicious hot beverage nearby, let’s talk about it.

Read The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern (2019), if you like…

• Whimsy, but in a deliberate way.
• Fairy tales. Folklore. Mythology. 2021 Francesca had not yet embarked on three years of studying religion and philosophy, but 2026 Francesca’s got a massive effing degree certificate and wants you to know the signs were always there that I was going to write my undergrad dissertation on storytelling, because I bloody love when a novel weaves fairy tales and different types of storytelling into its very structure.
• Layers. Books within books, stories within stories, getting to the end and pieces falling into place. A literary onion, if you will. (In many ways, my undergraduate dissertation was about literary onions.)
• A bit of detective work. This is a novel that appreciates a reader who can think for themselves, even if their thought is ‘this is not the novel for me.’
• The risk of being EATEN by a novel. Okay, I was eaten by this novel. My notes tell me I skived off work to read it back in a 2021 spring lockdown. In 2025 I think I just used it as an excuse for an early night, but that’s just the difference between your mid twenties and your early thirties.
• Symbols! Symbolism! And one of those symbols is a door, which also gives us keys, and also openings and closings and beginnings and endings…
• Very relaxed diversity, the sort that just sort of saunters in and grabs a drink then joins the conversation.
• A tiny wee bit of romance woven into the story in a very lovely way.
• Ambiguity around who’s the good guy and who isn’t, and why it might depend on what you already think. LAYERS.

My notes tell me that I wrote a draft Read If You Like for The Starless Sea not long after I wrote up my thoughts on the epically long bad review, about why it feels unnecessary to write huge negative reviews about a book you didn’t click with. Five years on, I still agree with what I wrote in that post – and I was right, my next book was better than the one I was promoting at the time, and my next one after that will be even better – and The Starless Sea is a book that polarises readers. Morgenstern’s other novel, The Night Circus, does too. I adore them both (I wrote about The Night Circus a couple of years ago) and wouldn’t bother talking about them if I didn’t get on with them, but 2021 Francesca wanted you all to know that the GoodReads reviews ‘are really, really extreme.’ I’m assuming they still are, but 2026 Francesca doesn’t have the energy to go to GoodReads and check. So I suppose a bonus point is ‘read it if you like recommending books to people that there’s a fifty-fifty chance they’ll hate.’ I’ve gifted The Night Circus to at least one person and regretted bothering; your mileage may vary.

Miraculously, although 2021 Francesca didn’t finish this post, she did take a photo of her library-issued paperback:

Bees are also pretty symbolic. And the colour gold is too, although possibly gold is not actually a colour. Is it a hue? A finish?

I’ll finish this before I get distracted looking up the HEX code for gold.

Look after yourselves!
Francesca

Thanks for reading. If you’d like to read my short stories and see behind-the-scenes work, you can sample? the No. 1 Reader’s Club on Patreon for a month with this link. No pressure to stick around! Think of it as trying a miniature dessert with no requirement to eat the whole menu.

Here are the books I’ve published so far and where you can find them. If you enjoy my book recommendations, browse my Bookshop.org page here. Keep in touch via my monthly(ish) newsletter!