Saturday, August 16, 2014

The Sea of Tranquility

The Sea of Tranquility

Katja Millay

Publisher: Atria Books
Publication Date: November 13, 2012
Pages: 434
Genre: Contemporary New Adult
Source: Borrowed from the Library


I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.

Former piano prodigy Nastya Kashnikov wants two things: to get through high school without anyone learning about her past and to make the boy who took everything from her—her identity, her spirit, her will to live—pay.

Josh Bennett’s story is no secret: every person he loves has been taken from his life until, at seventeen years old, there is no one left. Now all he wants is be left alone and people allow it because when your name is synonymous with death, everyone tends to give you your space.

Everyone except Nastya, the mysterious new girl at school who starts showing up and won’t go away until she’s insinuated herself into every aspect of his life. But the more he gets to know her, the more of an enigma she becomes. As their relationship intensifies and the unanswered questions begin to pile up, he starts to wonder if he will ever learn the secrets she’s been hiding—or if he even wants to.

The Sea of Tranquility is a rich, intense, and brilliantly imagined story about a lonely boy, an emotionally fragile girl, and the miracle of second chances.

As my favorite book and the namesake of this blog, it only makes sense that The Sea of Tranquility is the first book I review.




The Sea of Tranquility is full of memorable characters all so screwed up that it's impossible not to love them all, even the ones that you want to hate. The psychological aspects of this novel are done so well, that at parts I almost cried at what Nastya and Josh had to go through. Even the secondary characters had depth without taking away from the main story.

While the plot does begin to drag a bit in the middle, every other part of this book will have you racing on to the next page. The story line is so unlike any other that it's impossible to put down. Nastya and Josh are two of the most fascinating characters I have ever had the pleasure to read about. They were both faced with devastating tragedies and somehow are working to recover in their own separate ways. My only other issue with this book is that every character (every last one) is described as beautiful or georgeous when they are introduced, which obviously extremely unrealistic. However, that is fairly easy to ignore once you get past their introduction.

Nastya plays the role of the unreliable narrator extremely well, even in the way she acts. Sometimes, it can become irritating when a reader knows that a character is withholding information for too long, but that is not the case with this book. It's not just the story line and characters that make this a great book; its the writing of it. It all flows together so well to reflect what's happening in the story.

Over all, The Sea of Tranquility is an extremely well-written book with characters you'll want to be real and a story line that will pull at your heart. This is one of the most underrated books and you should definitely check it out! 


Five Star Fish

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for adding a link to your first review at the Saturday Review of Books. This book sounds like something I might want to add to myTBR list.

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