Book Review: The Palace at the End of the Sea

The Palace at the End of the Sea by Simon Tolkien (Lake Union Publishing, 2025).

Before you ask, yes, Simon Tolkien is the grandson of that other Tolkien. And he turns out to be an excellent novelist in his own right, while working in a very different genre. His riches-to-rags-to-riches novel The Palace at the End of the Sea, as it moves from New York to an English boarding school to pre-war Spain, has an almost Dickensian sweep (an adjective I don’t use lightly). Rather like David Copperfield, young Theo Sterling heads a cast of compelling, well-constructed characters, many of whom play pivotal roles in his life and development as he struggles to find his place in the world.

Theo is the son of Elena, a Mexican refugee whose family was killed by Communists, and Michael, a Polish immigrant who has left his family’s Jewish faith far behind. Little Theo doesn’t even know of his Jewish heritage until his long-lost paternal grandfather kidnaps him (temporarily) off the street one day. Though they live in the same city, the lively neighborhood where his grandfather takes him seems a world away from Theo’s own home, and there he hears tragic stories of ancestors whose existence he had known nothing about.

From that day on, Theo will come to feel more and more like an outsider, even in the places and with the people he knows best.

Michael, Theo’s father, now believes only in America and the promise it holds for those who will do anything to get ahead. But in the late 1920s and early 1930s, the fervency of that faith blinds him to the severity of the economic downturn, and eventually sends his family into free fall.

When life finally grows comfortable again, Theo can’t shake the devastating memory of his father’s downfall, and it nurtures in him an empathy for the poor and the oppressed, even while he can’t help but appreciate all the gifts and opportunities his new life has brought him.

Witnessing with alarm the rise of fascism in Europe, Theo realizes that the Communist Party “were the only ones who appeared to be doing anything about the Fascist threat,” and yet, thanks largely to his talks with a well-informed priest about the horrors taking place in Russia, Theo can’t bring himself to throw in his lot with the communists either. He’s always on the fringes of a movement, always willing to help but not to become a true believer, and Tolkien deftly and movingly describes what it feels like to be passionate about a cause and yet too principled to join many of its most avid supporters.

Theo’s fraught relationship with his mother, Elena, is particularly well-drawn. Unable to move beyond her traumatic past, Elena seeks comfort in faith and family, but the same religion that sometimes moves her to generous impulses also becomes a shield behind which she can hide from reality.

“She was seared by the experience of her youth,” Theo sadly realizes. “It had sapped her capacity for reason, twisting her naturally loving character to support a ruthless regime that her Savior would have abominated.” Theo loves his mother dearly, and is perpetually concerned about her fragile health, but at the same time feels increasingly isolated from her as she refuses to open her eyes to the suffering around her.

Caught between aristocrats and anarchists, between his own love of beauty and tradition and his passionate sympathy with the poor, Theo drifts uneasily, making himself a target for those who want to use him for their own ends. This includes Maria, the fiery Spanish anarchist with whom he falls in love. Here Theo breaks with David Copperfield by being drawn to a girl who’s as little like his mother as possible. Maria is the type of young woman to stand up and sing the communist anthem in church just to annoy her strict grandmother, and Theo recklessly follows her into danger not because of his own beliefs, but to help and protect her.

This last part left me devoutly hoping that in the sequel, due out in September, Theo will finally get his head on straight. But the fact that I want this so much demonstrates just how powerful and how well-told his story is.

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