The Starless Sea

I was super intrigued by this book. It's filled with little mysteries that slowly unravel to reveal a fantastic and imaginative web of stories within stories. The interludes are beautifully written and have an elemental quality to them that makes you feel like they've always existed. They're poetic and very fairy-tale. I love that kind of thing, so naturally these sections really stood out to me. That being said, this book took a lot of effort to get through, it's slow and repetitive (on purpose) but that didn't make it easier to finish. This book asks a lot of interesting questions about stories, what makes a story, and the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, etc. then leaves it up to the reader to determine a lot of those answers on their own... which could be a feature or a bug depending on what you hope to get from this book.
I think I would have loved this as a collection of enigmatic short stories, but despite my excitement around the concept, the plot of this book left me a little cold. I liked it but had a hard time connecting with the characters and the end of the book was kind of like a fever dream that was so all over the place that I had to reread it like 5 times to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I was expecting something more like Gaiman's Neverwhere and while similar in a lot of ways, that's ultimately not what this is. I'd recommend this book more as a reflective read, take you time, don't rush it. The journey is beautiful but I'm not sure what the destination was supposed to be.