{"id":4591,"date":"2022-10-10T15:01:46","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T15:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/?page_id=4591"},"modified":"2022-10-11T08:30:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-11T08:30:46","slug":"the-starless-sea-by-erin-morgenstern","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/the-starless-sea-by-erin-morgenstern\/","title":{"rendered":"The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/starless-sea.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-4632\" src=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/starless-sea.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"191\" height=\"293\" \/><\/a>The Starless Sea<\/em>, by Erin Morgenstern<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>This is driving me mad \u2013 how on earth did I get this book? Did a friend loan it to me? Or recommend it? It\u2019s not my usual impulse purchase but I enjoyed it a lot: very Hardingesque or Susanna Clarke-esque gentle fantasy. We\u2019ve all read fantasy where there is a chosen \/ special one, maybe drawn in from our world to another \u2013 but in how many of those are they chosen to be the key to a world made of stories and underpinned by bees? Huh? Huh?<\/p>\n<p>Still, I would like her to have reined it back a bit. The style is lovely and utterly original in my experience \u2013 we get fairy tales full of symbolism and metaphor, all original to this book and worth the purchase price alone (had I actually paid for it; see my opening remarks), interspersed with a more traditional hero-protagonist story, with the former starting to feed into the latter as the story proceeds. But in the end there was just so much going on in non-linear fashion that it became hard to retain and I was just proceeding on faith that it all tied together. For so long the hero is at the mercy of powers he can&#8217;t begin to understand that it\u2019s impossible for him to have any kind of agency until about \u00be of the way through, which makes him likeable but not as interesting as he could be.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Starless Sea, by Erin Morgenstern This is driving me mad \u2013 how on earth did I get this book? Did a friend loan it to me? Or recommend it? It\u2019s not my usual impulse purchase but I enjoyed it &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/writing\/book-reviews\/the-starless-sea-by-erin-morgenstern\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":368,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4591","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4591"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4591\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4667,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4591\/revisions\/4667"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.benjeapes.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}