(no subject)

[seekingferret]

The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

This was a sweet albeit kind of heavy handed story about magical orphans facing societal prejudice and an unfeeling bureaucracy and learning how to understand their own self worth, guided by an awkward trio of queer adults who are also struggling to get their shit together. The speech Linus gives DICOMY at the end is way over the top but otherwise the book makes its points reasonably well.

But I struggled to completely connect with it. Ironically, though many of the reviews I found online criticized it for blasphemy and anti-Christian ideology, I actually found it too Christian. One of the magical children is the son of Satan, purportedly the Antichrist, and is endowed with reality warping powers and internal voices urging him to destroy the world. The book's heroic characters insist he's merely an imaginative and sensitive 6 year old who if properly loved will not destroy the world, but I found that even taking a side on this question was too theological on a path I was uninterested in following the book to. Either Arthur and Linus are right and Lucy isn't actually the Antichrist but merely a potential Antichrist, or they're wrong and the pull of his fated destiny isn't about his choices but about the role the prophecy will force him into. Klune created the book's worldbuilding, he can pick his own answer to this question, but if you're not invested in Christian eschatology it's not really an interesting debate.

Comments

[snippy]

Oh thanks for pointing out why I didn't really enjoy this book. And why I bounce off lots of other forms of entertainment. At core I simply don't get the whole christianity of it all, being a Jew. I never have.

[wickedwords]

I didn't relate to the characters that well either and came away with more of a 'meh' feeling about it. It just didn't speak to me.