In my very subjective, extremely biased opinion, The Starless Sea is a cure to the hangover of living in this timeline.
The bias stems from the sheer delight that's still clinging to my soul (do please note I'm valiantly refraining from saying "like honey to a spoon").
When I first hit "play" on the audiobook in my native tongue I didn't really expect anything but a famtasy novel about books. Half an hour in, I was in love. As soon as I finished listening, I started again, this time in English.
It's difficult to describe without just sharing my impressions. There are plenty books that read like a Rubik's cube, you try and put the elements together to get that lovely moment of clarity when you figure out the point. This one? Reads like a puzzle done entirely in watercolours. The images shift and stay the same, depending on the light and your point of view. Yet, they remain true. And not true.
In fact, The Starless Sea would make the loveliest animation. I can't imagine it being filmed, but animated? Absolutely.
The thing that hit me straight underneath my ribs was this one line about spirituality that echoed my experience exactly, along with Mirabel describing the weather as "so poetry". Sometimes I bite my tongue before I say something like "today feels like wildflowers blooming on concrete, I wonder which will survive?" because I'm just tired of getting the "wtf do you mean" stare. Having a character express themselves similarly was a treat.
The Starless Sea gave me Mirabel and her "so poetry" comments, wading through fairy tales, symbols and recurring elements sprouting all over the pages, labyrinths of imagination, three love stories, and the beauty of endings and beginnigs, beginnings and endings, and how they exist and mean the same thing.
I'm still a little dazed and entirely charmed. I wonder if I will still feel that in the third reading.