The House in the Cerulean Sea

Travis Klune was born and raised in the small rural town of Roseburg, Oregon. He had undiagnosed ADHD and struggled in school, but he spent much of his childhood reading and writing poems and stories. His first novel, Bear, Otter, and the Kid, was published in 2011, and from there, Klune’s writing career took off. He’s since written more than two dozen novels for children and adults. Following many other authors writing queer fiction under pen names, Klune has published primarily under the name TJ Klune. Klune’s books tend to explore concerns and identities close to his heart—many of his characters are queer, asexual, and/or neurodivergent. He’s passionate about writing happy endings for queer characters in particular.

The House in the Cerulean Sea was inspired in part by President Trump’s family separation policies at the U.S.-Mexico border, and—controversially—by the “Sixties Scoop.” In the 1950s, as Canada began to close its residential school system, it instituted policies in which authorities could apprehend (or “scoop”) Indigenous children from their families and tribes, place them in foster care, and then facilitate their adoptions by White families, all while keeping them disconnected from their families and tribes of origin. These two policies provided Klune the historical inspiration for the way magical children are treated in the novel, though his reference of the Sixties Scoop in particular has led to immense criticism for cultural insensitivity. Many of the characters and places in Cerulean Sea are named after characters from Greek mythology. Marsyas, for instance, was a musically inclined satyr, the muses (including Calliope and Thalia) lived on Mount Parnassus, and Helen was a demigoddess. Klune has said in interviews that many of his books, The House in the Cerulean Sea included, were written in part to give voice to queer and/or neurodivergent characters.

In 2024, Klune wrote a sequel to The House in the Cerulean Sea, titled Somewhere Beyond the Sea. Many of his more recent novels, like his The Extraordinaries series, are similar in feel to Cerulean Sea in that they’re lighthearted and warm, with happy endings. But in 2023, Klune’s publisher rereleased his 2015 Greencreek series, beginning with Wolfsong—and many readers were surprised by both how sad and how sexually explicit his earlier works are. Cerulean Sea won the ALA Alex Award in 2021. The Alex Award honors books written for adults that also appeal to teens. Other notable winners featuring LGBTQ characters include Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, Winter’s Orbit by Everina Maxwell, and Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe. Like Klune with most of his novels, E. M. Forster insisted that his 1913 gay romance novel, Maurice, feature a happy ending—but he believed it would be unpublishable in his lifetime, due to homosexuality being illegal in the UK until 1967. Forster died in 1970, and Maurice was published in 1971.