The House in the Cerulean Sea by T J Klune

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

-

I recently read In The Lives of Puppets by T J Klune and found myself totally in love with the story. That was my first exposure to Klune’s work, and I quickly picked up another of his books - The House in the Cerulean Sea. I was happy to find myself just as in love with this book!

The plot follows a man by the name of Linus Baker, and it feels like a pleasure to follow his character growth throughout. Every character in this book is just utterly loveable, except for those who aren’t supposed to be! This makes it impossible to put the book down - I was desperate to see what they were going to do next and also rooting for them all to do well.

To get to know such a breadth of characters in such detail as Klune manages is impressive. On starting my read, I wondered if I would struggle to care about each of the children individually, but Klune does a brilliant job of making it impossible not to. Also, it’s not just the children I found myself coming to care about. Every single character in this book had their own depth of personality that I related to on some level.

There are a decent number of sub-plots throughout this book, too. I think this is always something of a risk in a book as it can make it harder to follow the overarching plot and to keep track of everything. But Klune does this so well, and I honestly barely had to think about following along with what was happening it was so easy!

The story itself is heartwarming, funny, emotional, and charming. I felt every emotion reading this book and had to genuinely to put it down to squeal about it at some points. It took me back to a feeling of being in my teens and discovering my love for reading all over again.

My only less-than-positive comment on this book is it did feel like it took a little while to fully get me hooked. Up until about the half way point really I found myself wondering if it was not going to live up to my (admittedly very high) expectations. But it was as though the half way point gave the entire book a boost and from then on I didn’t want to put it down.

This book is one that I think every single person should read at some point. I don’t know how anybody could read it and not thoroughly enjoy themselves whilst doing so!

“We should always make time for the things we like. If we don't, we might forget how to be happy.”