Why did I get this book?
It was well-reviewed (though I hadn’t read the reviews in detail), seemed popular, I liked the look of it when I was in the bookstore. Good cover design—I hate to say it but for a lot of genre fiction, the cover design and spine are often what grab me or turn me off. (These days I’m especially disinclined to pick a fantasy work up if it is “Book 1 of the Bra’Xel’AN Saga” and the back blurb says something like “Rakeliallia Priteesh is a cunning thief with secret magical powers who has been in hiding from a sinister conspiracy since her childhood. But now ancient forces are rising and she has no choice but to seek allies to stand against the darkness!!!”)
Is it what I thought it was?
I didn’t have any strong preconceptions at all of what it was about—I went in blind.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
As per below, I wasn’t wild about it myself, but I’d recommend it to some readers, so I will be glad to pass it along. It is a good book for me to think about in terms of struggling with whether I didn’t like it because I’m not the target audience or because it has actual technical flaws.
Quotes
“Linus Baker was a soft man with a heart longing for a home. And so he went as quietly as he’d arrived.”
“Sometimes, he thought to himself in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted. And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
The last quarter or so of the book are very heart-tuggingly pleasing and satisfying, but I found it to be tough to make it that far. Not because the earlier parts are hard or depressing, but just because the work to set up the happy resolution drags along, feels obvious and sometimes has a kind of tonal whimsy that feels both thin and forced. I also found the world-building a bit jarring at times.
The protagonist is a low-ranking case worker in a huge bureaucratic agency that administers group homes for magical children, with “magical” being both “children with magical superpowers” and “magical and supernatural beings who are children”. There’s some real tension early on for the reader in terms of just how sinister or abusive this system might be, because it is fairly plain at the start that the protagonist is not terribly self-aware nor deeply attentive the overall nature of the work that he does. (His primary job is to visit the group homes and evaluate them for quality of care and whether the children placed there are able to contain their powers safely.) The basic set-up is familiar enough in this respect that I was interested in how it was going to go—was it going to turn out that the whole system is actively genocidal, was it about enlisting magical children in some sinister army, was it just what it seemed to be (e.g., a bureaucracy ostensibly serving the ‘public good’ but catering to general bigotry about ‘magical children’ while neglecting the children themselves). It ends up pretty much being the latter—the orphanages are rather akin to Native American boarding schools, a system that is about marginalization and domination. But it’s also very plainly about queer identities, and that’s the interesting move the book makes, which is to see the possibility in sequestration of making the orphanages over into safe, secure refuges from a hostile world, of a kind of redeeming ‘seizure’ of the homes so they can be remade into consciously queer spaces.
So it’s possible that if a fairly substantial amount of the book frankly bored me, it’s because I am intellectually and philosophically very happy with that theme but it isn’t as emotionally precious to me as it might be to someone who feels directly addressed by it. But I did end up feeling that that the protagonist is a very tedious person to have to accompany on his version of the hero’s journey for much of the book because he is so exaggeratedly down-trodden and one-dimensional until his heart grows three sizes—essentially until he comes out of the closet, awoken both by romantic love and by love in general for the metaphorically queer community of particularly unusual magical children that he’s been asked to evaluate. There’s a tremendous amount of telling rather than showing around him for the first half of the book—he seems both rather unobservant and rather dull until he gets to the titular house at the cerulean sea, and then we hear constantly from the people he meets that he seems rather shrewd or that there is more to him than meets the eye or that they’re impressed by something he said when nothing has been said or done that actually seems to warrant that appraisal.
Which, in fantasy terms, is nothing exceptional—you could argue it is the most common arc of character development in fantasy and one of its major appeals to its readers, e.g., that a person whose actions appear rather banal or ordinary is in fact the prophesied hero, the frog prince, the secret heir, the apprentice who will grow into the greatest warrior of all. Taran Assistant Pig-Keeper is in some sense aggravatingly callow and yet some of the shrewdest, bravest and most powerful people in the kingdom keep saying that they see great potential in him and keep a careful eye on him. Frodo Baggins is just a hobbit but somehow he ends up with the One Ring. So in this book Linus Baker, the downtrodden bureaucrat, is the same kind of figure: the ordinary middle-aged man who has no friends, is meek and passive at work, and who seems to have no inner life who awakens to his own powers of observation, who discovers what he can be, and who finds love and a real mission in life. It is that same kind of exciting wish fulfillment. I just felt that his ordinariness and misery was so exaggerated in a third-person omniscient style (e.g., the book itself confirms that he is not merely playing at being compliant while actually having an inner self that is shrewder and more defiant than he seems to be, but is on the inside as he appears on the outside) that it was really a tedious slog to spend time with Linus until it stops.
The magical children at the Cerulean Sea also felt rather forced to me in that way—we’re meant to find them charming, whimsical, and loveable but it is precisely the way the book keeps underlining that this is how you should see them that wore me down after a while. There isn’t any space to breathe around the characters or their interactions; the need to make the house into a moral triumph against an indifferent or hostile world ends up sanding any rough edges off the children themselves. They are trying to heal from damage, from the hostility they arouse from normal people, to feel safe, and each of them is a different kind of creature or being with a different nature, but it never feels as if they are in any deeper emotional or characterological sense particular or different from one another—as if the possibility of disagreement or conflict within their world is by authorial fiat pushed off to the side.
The sincerity of the book and the insistent vision underlying its story is attractive. I am sure there are readers who would feel both inspired and comforted by it. I just couldn’t get there, and I prefer to think that’s mostly about the way the story gets told, about the styling of the prose, about the handling of the characters and their development.