Review of The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (Tor, 2020) is a lovely novel of bureaucracy, music, and found family. With a marvelous cast of characters and occasionally hilarious side comments, it weaves a cozy tale with secrets and a reasonable amount of peril.
Linus Baker is a caseworker with the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, charged with visiting the orphanages that raise children with magical powers or who are magical beings. After seventeen years of this work, he gets the call from Extremely Upper Management for a special assignment, inspecting an orphanage on a remote island where the children are a bit different from those he normally encounters.
Linus is a fantastic point-of-view character, part stuffy and bureaucratic and part an occasionally snarky dreamer. The characters he encounters on the island, two adult caretakers (one official and one unofficial) and their six charges, could all easily have inspired a book of their own, but having Linus encounter the concentrated weirdness of the island and its inhabitants works perfectly for this novel. By the time I was mid-way through the book, I thought I could see the direction it was heading, but Klune’s plot went in an entirely different (and much better!) direction.
While there are horrible things that have happened to some of the characters (primarily children who were abused), the novel treats those things as just as atrocious as they are, but it also shows the characters growing beyond their past traumas, offering up a good helping of hope and healing. And Linus, too, experiences a good deal of hope and healing that even he didn’t realize he needed.
If you’re a fan of things like Miss Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends and Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and the very narrow place where those two things intersect, you’re likely to love The House in the Cerulean Sea!
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