I felt like I wanted to like House in the Cerulean Sea, and it's not necessarily that I disliked the books. The characters are charming, the children especially stand out (my heart goes out to Chauncey completely), and while the story is simple and predictable, I don't actually think that's a bad thing. Before I read this book, somebody described it to me as "what it's like to read a Pixar movie," and I absolutely got that feeling.

The problem is that a) the book is... too long. A lot of the scenes drag for me, and if it had been about fifty pages shorter it might have gone down a bit more easily. My other problem is the book's very simple messages. I wouldn't even have minded the "people are afraid of those who are different from them" if they weren't spelled out so clearly and so frequently. The book is constantly just explaining its own mortality and messages, and for an adult novel, it became grating very quickly and made the book feel a bit trite in a way that seriously threw off what I might otherwise have cheerfully taken in as a lighthearted, simple but sweet novel.

For its faults, though, I definitely think the book is sweet and charming, and there were definitely moments that made me smile. I read it more slowly than I would have liked, and it was too long, but it felt worth the read overall... especially for Chauncey.