The House in the Cerulean Sea

TJ Klune's fantasy novel The House in the Cerulean Sea was released by Tor on 17 March 2020. It is the first book of the Cerulean Chronicles, and it is set in a version of the world where magical children are placed in orphanages and monitored by a government department.

Linus Baker works as a caseworker for the government department that supervises magical youth, and he has spent seventeen years writing reports on orphanages from a desk that is too small. His life is quiet, solitary and highly regulated, and his job is to travel to different homes, evaluate whether they meet the department's standards and submit careful reports. His new assignment is a classified one on the island of Marsyas.

There, six children live with a master who is not what the file describes: a gnome, a forest sprite, a wyvern, a shapeshifter, a boy who is not shaped like a boy, and one called Lucy, which is short for Lucifer. Linus has to decide whether what he writes will keep them safe or close the only home they have, and his department is not the only party interested in the island. The month he spends there changes what he thinks the job is for.

Klune writes the book as a warm, low-conflict story about a man learning to look after people, and it is the first of a series set in the same world. The sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, continues the story of the household.