The House in the Cerulean Sea Review

Ah, it’s a tale as old as time: at a lonely orphanage, a child turned away from an unfeeling world develops strange powers…

But instead of them, we focus on their government-appointed social worker for 300 pages.

Did that sound snide? I didn’t mean it to. Let me start over.

Linus Baker is a social worker with the Department for the Care of Magical Youth (DICOMY for short), and he is boring. He doesn’t have friends or an active imagination. He has a cat, but only because he’s too timid to tell it to leave. He is boring. He is our hero.

It’s such a gutsy move to write a story about children with magical powers from an everyman’s perspective, but it’s one I’m glad author TJ Klune took in this novel. Linus Baker has every bit as much growing up to do as any magical orphan you’ve ever read about, and is just as full of secret talent and potential, despite being a middle-aged man more used to an office chair than an adventure.

As he goes to an orphanage like no other to meet the children that even DICOMY thinks need to be isolated and top-secret (I won’t spoil who’s there, but readers are in for a treat), it is the seemingly mundane Linus who really demonstrates the book’s lesson that everyone has special qualities that flourish when in the right environment. The rest of the cast is developed well, and spending time with them reveals that people are rarely who we think they are, even if they threaten to beat us to death with a shovel and bury us in the garden.

Whoops. Spoilers.

That taste of the darkness aside, the book does occasionally get a little too syrup-y sweet for my taste. Some moments that were meant to warm my heart left me ready to skim the page and move onto the next scene. But those moments were rare, and a book as wholesome as this can be forgiven some sappiness.

If you’re looking for an escape of a book that isn’t prepared to emotionally devastate you at every corner, this could be the book for you. 4 inscrutable cats out of 5.