A review by womxyn
The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

adventurous emotional hopeful medium-paced

4.0

This is mostly a really cute and wholesome read. Overall I really liked it and I was really invested in the story and the characters from the start, it's 95% comforting and lovely and funny.

Unfortunately I felt a wee bit uncomfortable reading the (mildly-ish) fatphobic way Linus' body is described in the book. It's a body acceptance arc that is cute, but the tone feels clumsy at times. Possibly because it felt a bit out of synch with the rest of the book. So it's a minor let-down, not enough to stop me finishing the book.

Anyway here's a moderately spoilery outline of the  weird-to-read body stuff:

 

 In the first 50 pages, there's some fairly unpleasant negative self talk from Linus, cruel comments from colleagues and examples of (probably) disordered eating. Later, he has an adorable conversation with a child who is also fat and she celebrates her round body and encourages him to celebrate his. The arc then seems to kind of taper off a bit, until, towards the end of the book, he notices that his clothes are looser than they have been and he "found himself not caring at all" and shortly after he's described as "comfortable in his own skin for the first time in his life... life was so much more than worrying about a spare tire..." which is something, but given that most of the loose ends are tied up at the end of the novel in such a cosy way, I'd have liked to see Linus celebrating his body more, rather than choosing not to worry about it's size, and not caring if he bumped into desks

 

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Content Warnings

Minor: Fatphobia, Body shaming, Confinement, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, and Eating disorder

In the first 50 pages, there's some fairly unpleasant negative self talk from Linus, cruel comments from colleagues and examples of (probably) disordered eating. Later, he has an adorable conversation with a child who is also fat and she celebrates her round body and encourages him to celebrate his. The arc then seems to kind of taper off a bit, until, towards the end of the book, he notices that his clothes are looser than they have been and he "found himself not caring at all" and shortly after he's described as "comfortable in his own skin for the first time in his life... life was so much more than worrying about a spare tire..." which is something, but given that most of the loose ends are tied up at the end of the novel in such a cosy way, I'd have liked to see Linus celebrating his body more, rather than choosing not to worry about it's size, and not caring if he bumped into desks