One day, Zachary Ezra Rawlins checks out a strange book from his university's library and finds himself reading about himself. When he tries to investigate the origins of the book, he finds himself caught up in a mysterious and magical world of stories and Fate.

This is definitely my favorite book of 2021 (so far)! Like The Night Circus (also by Morgenstern), The Starless Sea is slow-paced and beautifully atmospheric, and the setting is as much a character as the actual characters. It doesn't just follow one or even multiple characters, but jumps around between different times and points of view and stories-within-the-story. I loved the meta and how it's a book about books and storytelling and readers. The romance was very much a subplot, which I don't mind at all, but it did feel a bit underdeveloped (my only complaint with the whole book). Despite the slow pacing, I read this book pretty fast until about the last hundred pages, when I stopped for a while because I didn't want it to end!

Happy ending meter (no specific spoilers, just my judgement of how happy the ending is because I always wish someone would tell me this before I read books):

Happy! (It doesn't seem like it's going to be until right at the very end though!)