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From: Chris Buckley <alan@sabir.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: The House in the Cerulean Sea. TJ Klune.
Date: 22 Sep 2024 14:21:33 GMT
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On 2024-08-28, Titus G <noone@nowhere.com> wrote:
> The House in the Cerulean Sea. TJ Klune.
> (Multiple award winner about 2011?)
>
> Extremely Upper Management of the Department in Charge of Magical Youth,
> (DICOMY), send Rules and Regulations agent, Linus Baker, on a supposedly
> routine investigation of the safety of the magical children in an island
> orphanage. Baker's desk at work is in an open hall with 14 rows of 20
> column deep desks and there are some fascinating bureaucratic rules.
> Magical children, feared and therefore hated by the public, are raised
> in "orphanages". This orphanage on a Sprite's island in a sky blue sea,
> houses extreme cases such as an anti-christ, a gnome, a phoenix,
> sprites, a wyvern, a shape shifter.
> It is mainly a fairy tale about social prejudice against those too
> different from the norm, (the non-magical), expressed as a love story
> when strictly formal agent Baker takes his tie off, becomes Linus and
> finds love for a family of magical misfits. The emotional manipulation
> is blatant but it still worked for me just outweighing all the social
> preaching reflecting Klune's own experience of prejudice as a
> homosexual. I enjoyed it despite its verbosity of 400 pages and fairy
> tale nature.
> The no-need-to-worry-about-binding Kindle edition is omly US$.99c
> About half a star less than 4.4 stars.
>
> Seanan MacGuire: "this book is very close to perfect".

A nice review, thanks. It prompted me to finally read the book - it's
actually a comparatively recent book (2020) that has gotten a lot of
mainstream acclaim and attention (55,000 ratings on Amazon, 705,000(!)
on Goodreads). I tend to like books with emotional manipulation more than
most, so the somewhat negative aspects of your review were not prohibitive.

But alas, I must agree with those negative feelings. The internal
components of the book themes were quite well done (character growth,
relationships, discovery of home/family). The external components were
more troublesome. The bad societal effects were unfortunately all
realistic, but the good effects, particularly towards the ending, were so
over-the-top as to be jarring, even in a fairy-tale. The happy ending just
was not consistent with the characters and world presented.

All of this was done on purpose by the author, of course. Queers in
the real world do not have this happy fairy-tale ending to all of the
realistic opposition they face.  But I object to an author inviting me
into their imagined world, and then destroying the consistency of that
world in order to make their thematic point.  I admire the cleverness
of the author in making the parallels between the real world and his
fantasy world, but I will not be reading more from Klune. The reader/author
compact is important to me.

Chris