“The truest tales require time and familiarity to become what they are.”
– Erin Morgenstern, The Night Circus
Synopsis : The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas, tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night. But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors.
I figured The Night Circus would be a good read following Water For Elephants. While Water For Elephants deals with the metaphorical illusions of circus life, The Night Cirus deals with the more fantastical and literal ones
The novel is filled with minimalist and carefully nuanced prose with an almost dreamlike quality. This isn’t the kind of novel you should speed read through or you will miss a lot of things. To fully appreciate the story it has to be carefully consumed.
The Night Circus has an array of fun and eccentric characters that will pull you into their world. Which is a good thing since the novel seems to sacrifice character for story. While Celia and Marco appear as our main characters, their personalities hardly come through.
Many of the minor characters carried the full range of emotion, causing them so seem more lifelike than the protagonist.
The Night Circus is a delightful book, especially for avid readers. Within the novel, Morgenstern comments on the world of readers, writers, and dreamers in a way I think we can all relate to.
This book is getting a lot of mixed-reader reviews and I think it is because it suffers from genre dissonance. This book is not a young adult or teen novel. Because Morgenstern is young, her book is about magic and has a romance element people assume it will appeal to young adults. I mean look at WSJ had to say about this book.
All of that sets readers up in the wrong mindset. This novel is not one to be tossed in with paranormal romance or YA. I enjoyed it and couldn’t put it down.
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1/2 of the blogging duo at Books and Sensibility, I have been blogging about and reviewing books since 2011. I read any and every genre, here on the blog I mostly review Fantasy, Adult Fiction, and Young Adult with a focus on audiobooks.