I have to say that I kind of needed this book. I absolutely adored The House in the Cerulean Sea, TJ Klune’s first book in what we’re apparently calling the Cerulean Chronicles, and I’m really hoping that the fact that the series has a title now means we’re going to see more of it. My review of that first book has become one of my most inexplicably popular posts– my seventh most popular post in the history of the blog, in fact– and traffic for it tends to come in waves. It’ll have 40 hits over the course of a day and then trail off, and then a couple of weeks later it’ll have a hundred, and then it happens again. I don’t know why! I don’t get enough information about referrers from WordPress and if there’s something else I can use to look up where views are coming from, I don’t know how to use it. Feel free to enlighten me in comments, if you have a suggestion.

Anyway, Somewhere Beyond the Sea returns to the orphanage on Marsyas Island, and the magical children and their two caretakers, who continue to have one of the most adorable relationships in all of literature. This book lives in Arthur Parnassus’ head, though, instead of Linus Baker, the main character and POV of the first book. While the switch makes perfect sense in the context of the series, Arthur is a darker, angrier character than Linus, and some of the gentleness and charm of the first book is lost in the switch. This book also introduces a couple of actual villains, as DICOMY, the Department In Charge of Magical Youth, Linus’ employer from the first book, turns on the orphanage and in particular on one of the children who live there. There is another DICOMY inspector, this one very much cut from the “I pretend to be here to help the children and am absolutely not here to help the children” cloth that I was so pleased to see Linus was not in the first book.

The first book was about a family forming. This one is about threats to tear that family apart, although the addition of a new child to the orphanage adds another new perspective that isn’t as negative as the two representatives of DICOMY.

Ironically, while the book isn’t quite the cozy “big gay blanket” of the first book, I found that I related to Arthur more than I ever did to Linus, which wasn’t something I was expecting on the way in. Arthur has a traumatic past– that’s not the bit I relate to, mind you, as I can’t really make that claim– but he spends much of the book struggling with his temper, as he has the ability to simply make the threats to his family go away in the most violent and retributive manner possible and repeatedly chooses not to, as that’s not the person he wishes to be.

Let me just say that it is not difficult for me to relate to a character who is a father and an educator who occasionally struggles with preventing his rage at the injustice and unfairness of the world from affecting the way he lives in it. Not difficult at all. I lack the ability to set things on fire with my mind, however, so his struggle has a touch more immediate salience than mine might.

Most interestingly, I think with Arthur and particularly Arthur’s past, and the fact that this book does dwell on trauma in a way that Cerulean Sea did not, Klune is in some ways addressing the criticisms of his first book, which I won’t go into here, but you’re welcome to click on that link up there. It turns out that Arthur Parnassus ending up the Master at Marsyas Island was not an accident. I’ll leave it at that.

I can’t issue quite as strong a recommendation for this book as I did Cerulean Sea, but that was one of my favorite books of the year it came out and remains my favorite of Klune’s books, so that’s not saying a lot. This is still a comfortable #2 in his body of work, and you should give it a read.