The House in the Cerulean Sea

Imagine you go out to a bakery and you buy yourself a large chocolate cake. This bakery has been recommended many times, particularly the chocolate cake. “It tastes so great!”, people tell you.

You bring the cake home. You eat the first piece. Delicious! People were right! You have another slice. Damn, that's some good cake. But you're sugared out now, and there's still a lot of cake left. You've wondered if maybe the cake should have been smaller. Maybe they should have had less chocolate on the cake. You're not sure. And then out of nowhere, the baker breaks into your house with a gun and forces you to finish eating the entire cake. You tearfully force yourself to finish the entire cake, being overwhelmed with how sugary and sweet it is. At the end of all of this, you no longer look back at those first two slices very fondly. In fact, you don't want any cake for a long, long time.

That's what reading this book felt like to me. There was a time in which I was sure it was a five star read for me. Then it spent awhile being a four star read. And then the last 50-75 pages had me rolling my eyes so hard they threatened to stay at the back of my skull, and I wanted to give it two stars. So three stars it is.

This book is so heavy on the sentiment that it ignores everything else. There were some good things in it, some stuff I really enjoyed, and some humor that I loved. I think it has good messages for everyone, but particularly for kids or teens. There are lot of things to enjoy about this light romp of a novel, and I understand why it has the rating it does.

...but Jesus Christ, it just really hammers every single point home over and over. It's the feel good book equivalent of an evangelist never stopping trying to convert you to their religion.

But all that said, I have one big problem with this book. Once the problem presented itself, it was so annoying that it exponentially made every page worse afterwards. The main character, Linus Baker, is a caseworker for magical youths at orphanages and visits them to assess whether or not they are safe for the children. He is assigned to a house near the ocean that is an extremely secretive assignment, and has to be there for a month.

In the beginning of the book, Linus is a strict, curmudgeony, fat, uninspired, boring, uninteresting person whose only selling point is that he is slightly more interested in the genuine welfare of children than his co-workers are. And I do mean slightly. And yet, after a week of staying at the Cerulean house, despite doing nothing that would warrant this behavior, everyone there starts treating him as if the sun shines out of his ass. He will do literally the BARE MINIMUM of a reasonable person and the characters will literally tell him there is nobody else on earth like him. Further into the novel, characters starting saying things like, “Linus, you marvelous man” or “You, you unbelievable creature, you” and then the end of the book cranks this behavior up to an unfathomable level. This is incredibly eye rolling because Linus is not shown to be incredible or marvelous or unique. He is shown to be passively interested in the welfare of children, and is just LESS of a bigot than everybody else in the novel. He does change from beginning to end, but not in a believable way. I simply do not believe that Linus was written well enough to be convincing in this type of plot, and I don't believe the relationships developed in this book would have been possible in a month. At least, not as shown here.

And for that reason, the last section of the book was not for me at all and greatly hampered my enjoyment. I'm glad a lot of other people weren't bothered by this; I was getting that sweet, feel good feeling that others were for awhile and I wish that continued.