"The Starless Sea": A Brief Overview Quiz

Answer: Four

The books are "Sweet Sorrows", "Fortunes and Fables", "The Ballad of Simon and Eleanor", and "excerpts from the Secret Diary of Katrina Hawkins". There are also interpolated interludes, collectively known as "Another Place, Another Time". Altogether, these sections contain interweaving story lines as well as mysteries and puzzles for the reader to solve along the way.

Answer: Zachary Ezra Rollins

Parts of the story are told from the viewpoint of other characters, but Zachary's is the central story line that weaves through the entire tapestry of the tale.

Answer: The son of the Fortuneteller

Zachary's mother, Madame Love Rollins, performs psychometry and tasseomancy and does other types of fortunetelling. When Zachary was a boy, she ran a shop in New Orleans. Now that he is in grad school, she lives in a farmhouse in upstate New York.

Answer: Video Games

Zachary's thesis is in Emerging Media Studies, with concentration on video game design as it relates to psychology and gender issues. In practice, this seems to mean he spends a lot of time playing video games.

Answer: A storyteller called Dorian

An unconventionally handsome man in his mid thirties, Dorian meets Zachary when Zachary wanders into a storytelling space at the party. There, he tells the young man a story that resonates throughout the novel. Later, Dorian asks him to meet him at the New York Public Library, where their adventures begin in earnest.

Answer: There are books, books and more books...everywhere!

Near the beginning of the novel, Zachary considers the special place, initially referring to it as an underground library but then changing and broadening his name for it. It is, he concludes, a book-centric fantasia. As the remainder of the novel proves, this is an excellent description.

It is a place your quiz creator desperately, achingly longs to visit. Books! Books everywhere! And cozy, well-lit alcoves with comfy chairs, and all but endless time to read. And not just books. There are paintings and sculptures, mosaics and tapestries and surprising architectural elements.

The world hinted at in "Sweet Sorrows", the world Zachary eventually enters, is a story lover's paradise. And yet it is more as well - a place of mysteries and unexpected shadows.

In other words, it is a place of infinite love and profound magic.

Answer: Cats

Cats seem to be everywhere: Cats strolling along passages, cats curled up asleep in chairs, the tips of cats' tails vanishing around corners. Eventually an orange Persian adopts Zachary, seemingly ratifying the fact that he belongs there.

Answer: Bee, Key, Sword, Heart, Crown and Feather

In the ordinary course of things (and of course there are always exceptions), entrance to the special place as well as to some extent one's place in it, is governed by the rolling of six six-sided dice bearing these symbols.

Answer: With a pirate and a girl

The pirate is, we are told, a metaphor; but, he is no less real for all that. Nor are metaphors any less real for being people and things. Indeed, sometimes imagination can be more real than what is commonly thought of as reality. And love is the most real of all.

Answer: True

Sometimes love really does conquer all in the end, or is it the beginning?