I may forget things about the characters and plot (like, a lot of things, but we’ll get to that), but I will always remember the completely enveloped way I felt while reading it. Anyways, the point is, the highlight (far and away) of this novel as the atmosphere, the aura, the vibe, it gave off. Like, the kind that leaves a particular scent behind when they sweep past and don’t notice you, that just stays with you and makes it so you cannot forget them and any time you smell that scent elsewhere, you are immediately brought back to the moment you saw them first. This book is the word version of a very attractive but hard to pin down secret crush. Well, the first and primary world that comes to mind to describe this novel is beguiling. He ends up teaming up with Mirabal, a pink-haired protector of this other world, and Dorian, an attractive but mysterious sort of ally, to unravel mysteries of time and fate and find his own place in both the story and in his own life.

A series of clues about bees and keys and swords, along with an impromptu trip to a book-themed masquerade ball, lead Zachary to this other place, full of books and stories and magic…and owl kings and the moon and pirates and lovers and story guardians and, of course, the Starless Sea. The Starless Sea is about Zachary Ezra Rawlins, a sort of nerdy, reader, gamer-type college student who falls into (or more like, walks through a door into) another world after finding a mysterious book in his university library that is about himself. “She wove narratives of what would happen, what might happen, what had already happened, and what could never happen and blurred them all together.”

The starless sea series