“A middle-aged caseworker for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth is sent to evaluate a remote orphanage that may contain the Antichrist. The Mythopoeic Award winning cozy fantasy.”
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The House in the Cerulean Sea is TJ Klune's 2020 cozy fantasy, the Mythopoeic Award winner and one of the defining contemporary cozy-fantasy novels of the past decade. Linus Baker is a middle-aged caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, a British-coded magical bureaucracy that oversees magical orphanages. He is dispatched by Extremely Upper Management to spend a month evaluating Marsyas Island Orphanage, a remote facility run by Arthur Parnassus and housing six exceptional children: a gnome, a forest sprite, a wyvern, a were-Pomeranian, a green-blob amorphous being named Chauncey, and a six-year-old named Lucy who is the literal Antichrist.
Klune's project is to write a cozy fantasy that is in conscious opposition to the grimdark conventions that have dominated contemporary fantasy since George R. R. Martin. The Marsyas Island sections are intentionally low-stakes at the plot level (the children are not in danger from each other, the orphanage runs well, Linus learns slowly) and high-stakes at the emotional level (Linus's life in the gray London bureaucracy has emptied him, the children's belonging in the orphanage threatens to expose how empty his own life has been). The Linus-Arthur central relationship is the literary engine of the book and a queer love story in the cozy-fantasy register the audience came for. The novel's structural critique (the institutional surveillance regime around magical children as an obvious analogue for several historical sequestration programs) is made through the texture of the story rather than through speeches.
Recommended for cozy-fantasy readers, for fans of Becky Chambers's Monk and Robot novellas, Travis Baldree's Legends and Lattes, and the broader contemporary cozy-fantasy movement. Read Somewhere Beyond the Sea (2024, the direct sequel) next. The Daniel Henning audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.
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