One of the most loved books I’ve seen in the book community is The House in the Cerulean Sea. I’ve never read TJ Klune, and when Hoopla offered the audiobook, I decided to pick this happy-looking book up. The book’s popularity was even more cemented when I asked folks on Instagram which book I should read, and many people messaged me telling me how much they loved this story and hoped I would enjoy it too.
And I can see why this story is very well-liked. The writing is simple and rich with fun storytelling quirks. Each character is vividly sketched, while the found family theming shines through in an emotional arc that pulls you along with Linus and Arthur, and the Children. Added to the found family is a soft romance that fills you with a yearning for love and quiet, understood mutual feelings.
But something about the world of the House in the Cerulean Sea felt off to me. I gathered DICOMY is rehousing magical children. I’m not sure who the actual government is. A mob in a seaside village wants to murder magical children. And yet, we don’t address any of those concerns besides sweet words and promises to understand each other better and hope for kindness.
That little nagging feeling of doubt about the story was confirmed when a BIPOC Canadian messaged me about the book. I’d just finished reading and mentioned my read on Instagram when this follower sent me an article about TJ Klune’s inspiration for the story. As I read the interview with Klune, my stomach sank, and I kept shaking my head in exasperation.
TJ Klune says he started brainstorming about the house in the cerulean sea several years ago. Finally, finally, he had a piece of the story — a quiet, unassuming social worker, a house, and children. But the story didn’t come together for him until he read about the Canadian’s government forced removal of Indigenous children from their family homes. Then the plot fully clicked for him.
Klune says, “I researched more, and discovered instances the world over, in my own country and abroad, of the same thing happening: families being separated because they were different, because of the color of their skin, because of their faith, because those in power were scared of them. I wrote The House in the Cerulean Sea in the spring of 2018, months later, in the summer, news exploded from our southern border about families searching for a better life being separated and put into government-sanctioned facilities. History, as it does with terrifying consistency, was repeating itself once again.”
Klune took real history and wrote an inspired world in which the government houses magical children and keeps them separated from society. This left me with so many questions. More questions than his story could answer. And Klune only gives one answer — Klune says the center of his story is kindness.
I’ll quote Klune again, “I never strayed away from kindness as a theme. It was — and still is — important to me. To offer a hand in compassion rather than a fist raised in anger seems like it should be common sense, but many appear to have forgotten that. We, like Linus discovers, need to use our voices for those who can’t speak for themselves, those who should be allowed to be small in this great, wide world. But sometimes we also need to shut up and listen to those small voices, because if we don’t, we run the risk of drowning them out…. The House in the Cerulean Sea is my great wish into the universe, a fable about the goodness in us all, if only we can believe in it. Hope is a weapon, kindness our battle cry. As long as we stand together, I know we’ll shape this place we call home into something we can all be proud of.”
This sounds great — especially in theory — but I still have unanswered questions. If Klune’s inspiration is the government’s historically separating families — then where are the families of these magical kids in Klune’s stories? Klune’s characters point out that the orphanages aren’t really orphanages — they’re the children’s homes. But what about the kid’s parents? Why are children separated and adopted by Klune’s main characters?
I think several of the children in Linus’ found family don’t have parents. One child mentions his mom isn’t in the picture, and his dad doesn’t want to stick around. But these are only six children and their stories. In this magical world Klune writes about, there are many, many orphanages. And barely a mention of the original families of the children DICHOMY works to rehome.
Kindness won’t put the families back together. At the end of the story, the self-serving leaders of DICHOMY resign. But the system is still in place. Kindness hasn’t united families or healed the trauma of forced displacement. Kindness can only go so far in public policy changes and most certainly can’t fix the trauma of oppression.
TJ Klune’s story is very much a magical escape. People who haven’t experienced the trauma of displacement can write sweet stories that are inspired by historical trauma. But the stories won’t offer healing — and certainly can appear trite compared to the real work of restoration. It doesn’t strike me as ironic that the same weekend I read The House in the Cerulean Sea, the Canadian government announced the finding of 215 indigenous children at a Residential School. Kindness won’t bring those families justice. Trite words about historic wrongs won’t right the oppression First Nations are experiencing today. We can wish for a fantasy world, where kindness quiets a mob and children are adopted by loving parents. But in the real world, history is still happening today, and we have to follow through on the hard, personal labor of undoing colonialism.