Congrats to Ada DeOrdio!
Read her essay below.
I have been reading books since before I can remember and in my 15 years of life I haven’t met many books that can match the impact that most of TJ Klune’s books have left on me. But in particular, after reading Klune’s novel “The House in The Cerulean Sea” I felt down to earth while also being so invested in the story, that I was flying higher than the clouds. I had this book on my TBR for months, but when I finally caught a chance, a break from the mountains of schoolwork, track practices, mountain biking races, chores, and stresses of my busy high school life, I jumped into it and I mean literally. As I read about the magic of Marsyas Island I could feel the waves beneath my feet, Talia’s flowery smell next to me, Chauncey’s tentacle eye stalks watching me, and Lucy’s devilish grin on the page. I began to think about every aspect of the book throughout my boring and dragging day. Almost the same way Linus would dream of the ocean before he met it. Not only did TJ Klune’s book allow me to relax for a while and breathe freely, but it gave me the opportunity to think deeper into the thoughts the moral of the book had pushed into my head. It inspired me to consider the underlying topics that Klune added to his already marvelous book: prejudice, LGBTQ+ rights, discrimination, and some of society’s unwillingness to see those for who they are and to look beyond their closed boxes. As context, I have spent my entire life believing in seeing beyond my box, which is never closed, and to never judge a book by its cover, but “The House in The Cerulean Sea” gave me more room to further ponder those ideals and realize how important it is to have them. This book is an excellent example of how societal norms are challenged by the irregular person and how even though change is hard, it can be done if enough people fight for it. Many characters throughout the book choose to push for the children of Marsyas Orphanage’s rights as people and as magical creatures, but there are also many who unfortunately refuse to accept the shift in mindset and best of all there are characters who become so enlightened by the children that they reform their mind to fit the big idea of equality between humans and magical creatures on the island and throughout this big, beautiful fictional world.
Besides making me feel realization, “The House in The Cerulean Sea” helped establish a directional feeling about the person I am and who I want to become. At the beginning of the book Linus Baker’s character was described as a rather grumpy, conventional man who didn’t change things and didn’t choose to experience life as adventurously as others. And as I read that, a feeling formed in my heart, telling me to not choose that path in life and to be as wild and intrepid as I wanted to be. Before I read the book I knew what I wanted to be able to put myself out there and do what I felt was right, but it was almost like reading TJ Klune’s book turned up the volume on the calling I felt and now has made it more impossible to ignore than ever. I read this book and thought, I know now that I have to push to become the exact person I wanted to be. I also realized that a major theme throughout not only “The House in The Cerulean Sea,” but in all of TJ Klune’s books, which I’ve had the pleasure of reading, is to have the skill to be yourself and to never conform to what others tell you to be. This concept is a common message in many books, but it’s so well shown in “The House in The Cerulean Sea” that it left an extremely gratifying impression on me. TJ Klune wrote all his characters with such mystifying description and excellent background stories that he made understanding so easy and made me feel so much more connected to the book.
Overall “The House in The Cerulean Sea” has changed my perspective in so many exquisite ways and has really affected my outlook on life. So have all of TJ Klune’s books, especially “The Bone’s Beneath My Skin” and “Under The Whispering Door,” which both explain how precious life is and reveal the secrets behind love, life, and death. To end on a sweet note, a quote from “The House In The Cerulean Sea” that really sums up all the feels you get from Klune’s books, says, “Sometimes, he thought to himself in a house in a cerulean sea, you were able to choose the life you wanted. And if you were of the lucky sort, sometimes that life chose you back.” (Klune, 396)