So, after seeing his book floating around and getting good reviews for a while now, I got TJ Klune's The House By the Cerulean Sea out of the library and took it for a test drive.
The plot centers around Linus, a caseworker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He's been there for several year, investigating orphanages that house magical youth. His supervisor is a nasty boss, and acts oddly when Linus gets summoned before Extremely Upper Management and given a highly classified assignment to go evaluate an island orphanage off the coast. (We're never given much in the way of locations here, but given this reads a bit like Terry Gilliam, I pictured the orphanage as being off the coast of Scotland.)
He's given very little knowledge of what the residents are like, and the town nearest the island tends to looks with suspicion on the children and Mr. Parnassus, who runs the place. We find out fairly quickly the major concern is one Lucy (short for Lucifer), who is the Antichrist. There's also a Sprite, a gnome, a blob, a wyvern, and a werepomeranian. That the two adults on the island also turn out to be magical adults should not be a surprise to anyone.
Most of the book is focused on Linus learning and helping the children while being castigated by Extremely Upper Management about losing his objectivity. And falling in love with Mr. Parnassus, but that never really becomes a major plot point until well after the climax.
I mean, the overall theme about accepting people as the are without judgement I can get behind, and frankly, most readers of fiction spend so much time in other people's heads that I think the message is a case of the preacher giving his sermon to the choir. I mean, it's charming, but it really has no major emotional or physical conflict, beyond "Most of the townspeople hate us!", which in turn kind of falls on the whole "There are good people working to change that" trope.
While I might end up reading more of Mx. Klune's work at some point, I feel like this one is missing something to give it heft and oomph.
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