The House on the Cerulean Sea

By TJ Klune

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

I press this book on people. I’ve given it to so many people as gifts I can’t even count.

Linus Baker is a caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, a man who has organized his entire life around rules, forms, and not being noticed. He gets sent to a remote island orphanage to assess six extremely unusual children, one of whom may or may not be the literal Antichrist, and the man running the place, Arthur. I love this book for the island, and the magic, though it’s so much more than that. What I love the most is watching Linus change his mind.

That's such a small theme, Linus doesn't have a dramatic moment at the top of a mountain. Instead, he has dozens of small ones, a meal, a conversation, a child asking him a question he doesn't have a rehearsed answer for. These little moments accumulate into a man who makes better decisions than the one who stepped off the ferry. I haven’t read many books that trust growth to look like how it does in real life, quietly, over time.

Underneath the whimsy, this is a book about loving all of yourself, including the parts you've been told to keep hidden, the ones you've filed away because someone, at some point, made it clear they weren't welcome. Linus has to do that work on himself before he can do anything for the kids. The kids are doing the same work, in their own ways, trying to believe that the parts of them that make people afraid are not the parts that make them unlovable.

The book's whole argument is that those two things, self-love and the capacity to actually help someone else, aren't separate projects. You don't get to skip the first one and still achieve the second.