Toss All Your Worries About All The Things Into The Cerulean Sea

A Black Eyed Review of The House In The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune & Drag Story Hours

Vanity Fair | Trump’s “Dictator” Promise Is No Joke

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“Hate is loud, but I think you'll learn it's because it's only a few people shouting, desperate to be heard. You might not ever be able to change their minds, but so long as your remember you're not alone, you will overcome.”

― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

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Toss All Your Worries About MAGA, Anti-Semitism, Anti-Palestine, Anti-Woke, Anti-Black, Anti-Trans, Anti-Gay, Pro-Book Bans, Anti-Drag, Anti-CRT, Anti-Immigration, Pro-Dictatorship, and Anti-Democracy Into the Cerulean Sea

I think we can all agree there is much to worry about. The world seems backwards, inside out and upside down. It feels like we’re living in an alternate universe where good is bad and bad is good, hate is love and love is hate, right is wrong and wrong is right. Turn on the news and you might find GOP congresspeople calling tried and convicted insurrectionists “hostages.” It’s funny how they can’t open their minds to the pronouns “they/them”, but they can reason themselves to discredit the terror they felt when they were running for their lives on January 6th, chalking the whole ordeal up as a peaceful protest or a harmless gathering of American citizens touring the Capitol. 

And all the while they spin ghoulish, boogiemen cautionary tales about drag queens named Yves St. Croissant, Bella Da Ball, and Harmonica Sunbeam. Weirdly, these GOP pundits feel no need to be cautious at all about a group of grown men called the Proud Boys, and they’d sooner burn a rainbow Pride flag than a red, white and blue Confederate one. 

There’s much to worry about. 

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HuffPost | A Brief History Of Drag Story Hour. A member of the extremist right-wing Proud Boys protests a drag show on March 19, 2023.

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HuffPost | A Brief History Of Drag Story Hour. “A protester stands outside a drag queen storytime event at the Church on the Square in Baltimore on Jan. 14, 2023.”

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“The things we fear the most are often the things we should fear the least.
It’s irrational, but it’s what makes us human. And if we’re able to conquer those fears,
then there is nothing we’re not capable of.”

― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

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But… all this strife, acrimony and terror has led to beautiful art being created – especially by authors inventing beautiful worlds for us to escape to where we can process our real world problems through characters who help us dream better dreams and be braver human beings. THE HOUSE IN THE CERULEAN SEA by TJ Klune does just that. 

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Fanart for The House In The Cerulean Sea. The Marsyas Island Orphanage

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This book is a love story tucked into an adventure story nestled in an epic journey story wrapped in a fantasy story about diversity, equity, and inclusion. There’s plenty to love here. 

The story begins with Linus Baker who is as lovable, polite, and cozy-comfortable as Tolkien’s Bilbo Baggins. Like Bilbo, he’s contented in his predictable life – most certainly not an adventure seeker. He loves his creature comforts: his pajamas, his records and record player, and his cat named Calliope. Like Bilbo, he believes he has no real problems with anyone, no prejudices or biases. However, just as Bilbo’s prejudices and biases met him at his door with the presence of thirteen dwarves and a wizard, Baker meets his as a social worker assigned to check in on six magical children who live at The Marsyas Island Orphanage with their mysterious caretakers Arthur Parnassus and Ms. Zoe Chapelwhite. 

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“Because even the bravest of us can still be afraid sometimes, so long as we don’t let our fear become all we know.”

― T.J. Klune, The House in the Cerulean Sea

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Now… remember when I said the world is backwards and good is bad, love is hate, right is wrong? Welp. There’s some controversy swirling around this charming gem of a book. 

Some folks are up in a funk because the author—a White, gay man—said in an interview that he was inspired to write the story after reading about the Sixties Scoop – a time throughout the 60s when the Canadian government was removing (“scooping away”) Indigenous children from their Indigenous homes—without reason or consent—to place them into the homes of White, middle-class families in order to strip them of their identity, traditions, and culture. 

A few reviewers confused “inspiration” with “appropriation.”

To be inspired is to be mentally or spiritually stimulated. The Latin root of the word literally means "to inflame or to blow into.” Inspiration doesn’t take anything. Instead it excites or enlightens us to create something new. 

To culturally appropriate is to take the traditions, customs, dialects, religion, or heritage of a marginalized culture without permission or acknowledgement, for your own personal use in a dominant cultural setting. 

Appropriation takes everything. Instead of being inspired by a culture, it exploits and disrespects it. It doesn’t merely “borrow,” it refashions and erases. Peter Pan is a prime example of cultural appropriation. In the story, JM Barrie stole, maligned and stereotyped Indigenous people.

So being inspired by something is not at all the same as appropriating a culture. We can be inspired by stories of cultures outside our own without appropriating. I think fantasy is a perfect genre to do this, and Klune did this dang near perfectly. 

You will not find a hint of Indigenous culture, heritage, or traditions in this book. There are magical creatures: a gnome, a couple of sprites, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. The book is so far from representing any known ethnic culture at all that reviewers didn’t have these concerns until TJ Klune mentioned the source of his inspiration for the story long after the book’s well-received release. 

Here’s exactly what he said: 

It actually started from a Wikipedia article because I have a tendency to get lost in Wikipedia for a long time and that’s a problem. But I will be in one article and I’ll click on another one, then another one, and then another one until I’m completely off what I was trying to look up to begin with. But I came across something known as the Sixties Scoop, which was in Canada during the fifties and sixties, where indigenous children were taken from their homes and put into government sanctioned orphanages, for lack of a better word.

And the idea stuck with me. It was something that I could not shake. When I stumbled upon this article about children being taken because they were different or they didn’t adhere to what standards people thought should be at the time, it was something that I couldn’t get out of my head, but I didn’t want to co-opt, you know, a history that wasn’t mine. I’m a cis white dude, so I can’t ever really go through something like what those children had to go through.

So I sat down and I was like, I’m just going to write this as a fantasy. I’m going to write about an almost Orwellian society where the government sees everything and watches everything you do, and follow a man who is stuck in a rut. He’s a cog in a bureaucratic machine named Linus. I wanted to follow him…

I think that this story will bring the idea that we need to speak up.

We have to speak up for those that can’t speak for themselves. And that’s kind of the theme of the whole book - to raise your voice for those who don’t have one.

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And that, my friends, is the difference between being inspired by a story and appropriating a story. This story isn’t about the Sixties Scoop – it was inspired by the inhumanity within that story. This is not a retelling of events in any way shape or form.

So I hope that, in this muckety-muck of a mess that we find ourselves in these days, you’ll give this book a listen. The audiobook was delightful! 

And may you enjoy your stay at The Marsyas Island Orphanage and its wards who are all differently-abled and differently-gifted (yes, even Luci, the boy Antichrist). I hope you find it as charming as I did. 

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