The Night Circus: A Novel

A friend recommended this book to me. I had not read anything by this author, but I decided to try it after reading a few reviews. “The Night Circus” is a New York Times best seller and has had many rave reviews. Of course, there are always some readers out there who have no taste for this type of fantasy. I was glad I took the plunge and bought this book. I loved it! . The Night Circus is magical, surreal and utterly captivating. Originally, I bought the book on Audible. I was hooked by the Audible version. The narrator, Jim Dale, is excellent. He made the characters come alive and pulled me deeply into the story. I enjoyed the Audible version so much that I bought the paperback, from Amazon, as well. Incidentally, the paperback cover is beautifully done and is in keeping with the magic within. What a gorgeous paperback! Erin Morgenstern takes the reader on a journey of the imagination, a disorienting but exhilarating ride that juxtapositions reality and fantasy. It is like a fairytale that is set in the late 19th century. It could almost be one of Hans Christian Anderson’s tales, but it is certainly more intense and intricate. The circus suddenly appears in a field. A small boy, Bailey, waits for it to open, but he reads a sign that says it is only open at night. He thinks that is odd, so he hangs around the gate and sneaks in. He keeps coming back to the circus and is befriended by the twins Poppet and Widget who perform tricks with kittens. He is obsessed with the circus and feels like this is his real home. His family does not approve of his obsession with the circus, so Bailey has to sneak out at night when his whole family is sleeping. He meets a group of “Reveurs” or dreamers who follow the magical circus wherever it goes. He ponders whether he can run can away from home and even join the circus. The magician, Hector Bowen, Prospero the Enchanter, is surprised when he finds he has a daughter, Celia, and must care for her. He sees Celia’s potential in the art of illusion and trains her as a magician. In another location, Mr. A. H., the Man in the Gray Suit, rescues a young boy, Marco, from an orphanage and spends years training him in the magical arts. Celia and Marco are being trained for a challenge, a game in which they do not know the rules and do not know whom they are competing against. Every move they make affects all the people in the circus. Marco knows who Celia is and understands the game they are playing before she does. He starts playing tricks on her, but when she realizes Marco is her opponent in the challenge, she uses her powers to block his magic. They both work hard to increase their individual powers and defeat the other challenger. Marco and Celia, fight for control over the circus, a fight that will lead to death for one of them. However, as the years pass, they fall in love. They both want to give up the game and be together. When they see that is not possible, they each want to die and let the other live. Towards the end of the book, they know they have to break the rules of the game. Marco jumps into the circus bonfire, a bonfire that continually burns in the middle of the circus. Celia jumps in with him, and they become the core of the circus. They are neither dead nor alive, but they are together eternally. The competition is a draw; neither side wins the game. The circus is like an intricate clock that has to work perfectly, just like the large magical circus clock that is at the center of the circus and is essential to the circus’ operation. However, Frederick Thessien, the clock maker, is murdered. Mr. A.H., The Man in the Gray Suit, blames Hector Bowen, Prospero the Enchanter, for the murder. Marco and Celia stop playing the game, and the circus contortionist, Tsukiko, officially ends the challenge. The circus starts to fall apart and the performers hurry to catch the train that will take them elsewhere. Bailey had packed a few possessions and planned on running away from home to join the circus that night, but he took too long to get ready to go. When he finally reached the field where the circus had been, he found only the empty field. The circus had left town without him. Does that circus still exist somewhere or was it all a dream? Magic, danger, romance, jealousy, hate, and love are all here in this remarkable book. The characters are magnificent and memorable. I got so deeply into the twists and turns of the plot that I did not want to put the book down.

"The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not." While the opening does a great job at grabbing your attention, it took me a few chapters to get to where I felt like I could finish this book. The blurb on the cover of the book is actually very misleading. While there are two magicians locked in a duel, it is not that simple. There is much more to the story and I feel like those who read the jacket would assume this novel is something entirely different and color their thoughts on the story. It is a delightful story, set in a world that you will most certainly wish to inhabit after reading. I know all of the other reviews will give you a rundown of the story; I do not always like to do that in my reviews because I want to tell readers how I felt about the book. Therefore, there will be no story synopsis here- The story itself starts slowly, and though Morgenstern creates an air of mystery with her atmosphere, more character development would have served her much better. Much of the book I found myself wondering what was going on and while some authors can master the time jumps and split narratives, I found this to be a little confusing. The story would have more flow, if she had stuck to a straight narrative. I would have liked the action picked up much earlier, not ten years into the competition. However, I love all types of writing, but the one I love the most is the kind where the author does such a great job at creating imagery that the reader feels a part of the world in which the story takes place. Eric Morgenstern does a fantastic job at creating a world, where the reader can almost feel the warmth of the bonfire, smell the cinnamon thingamajigs and hear the sounds of the circus. Her excellent vision for her world is part of what makes this book worth reading. While, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book, I did feel like there was something missing. I feel like the characters I was supposed to care about did not really ignite with me until towards the end of the story. I think I wanted to know more about them, more about how they felt as all of this was going on. I think that if I were in the same situation that the main protagonists found themselves in I would have reacted much differently. Marco and Celia seemed to be content, up until the very end, to be puppets for two very strange and detached men. With all of that said, I will miss Le Cirque des Rêves. I will miss the atmosphere that Morgenstern created and I was just starting to become attached to the characters, I wish she had made me love them earlier in the book. Truthfully, that information on the book jacket rather spoils something that the reader should have been left to discover along with the characters

This is one, If not my favorite book of all time. This book surprised me by touching my soul in a way I wasn't anticipating. It does not mean this will be the same for every reader, but it did for me. With that being said, this book builds its world with beautiful prose and magical realism. This comes at a cost of a slower pace. A lot of emotions and relationships are built in subtext and the passage of time, things that can be easily missed by the reader and make them feel as if things just happen. It isn't a loud or in your face sort of book. It's a book made with the slow, subtle burn of life and the small things that can get lost between the cracks if one doesn't stop and contemplate. **Potential Spoiler Area That Goes Into Depth** This book states that there's a fierce competition between two magical illusionist, which is...sort of true? It's more like a slow-building competition of endurance, ingenuity, and skill. The rules and the endgame of the competition are not straightforward to the main characters nor to the reader. Magic is real in this world. Some is innate, some is learned, some are showy, and some are invisible. In this sense, it's a bit like the soft magic system of Harry Potter wherein how they do magic is never really explained, but here it is explained that anyone can do magic if they are taught, unlike Harry Potter. With that said, the magic performed is well done! What the character is doing and how their magic interacts with the world around it is very easy to imagine compared to many other books that I have read. The story is told in multiple POVs with chapters typically taking place in different locations and different times. We follow three different groups of people, the main two characters, three children, and you, the reader, all taking place at different times to an extent. This book is slower paced than books like Caraval. It focuses more on setting the scene and the world building that the circus exists in. I could smell and taste the foods (it made me so hungry), I could hear the people in the background moving about and talking, I could see the rooms and tents and practically walk with the characters. While people may state that the pacing is too slow, I feel as though it was to make room for building the world with beautiful prose and allowing yourself to get lost in it. After all, the circus itself is its own character and the characters who inhabit that circus come from very distinct places.

Ms. Morgenstern has created that sublimely rare gem of great narrative, compelling characters, and a superb setting using finely crafted writing; all of this accomplished in her debut novel. As I have noted elsewhere, there are a number of authors who are successful; they provide a good read and keep us connected to their novels that do one or two of these things well. They might provide good narrative and a compelling world of Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series. Her characters are fine but the writing is just adequate. She doesn't carefully craft her sentences. Many people look down their nose at Ms. Meyers, but there are many, possibly most writers who are good at some of these aspects of storytelling that are still worthwhile to read. I've read the entire Twilight series as well as The Host. I'm glad I did. She is successful for a reason, but she doesn't execute on every one of these elements of writing. Morgenstern is one of those very rare authors who do it all. Each sentence, description and phrase is a marvel. She almost takes the care of a poet, but over many pages. We become fully immersed in her characters, her world and her story. We do so in the "air" of her exquisite writing. She is a delight to read. I will pre-order anything she cares to write. As she's noted in her blog, she won't be cranking out a book ever year; I'm absolutely good with that. Her writing is worth the wait (said now in the early cycle of waiting for her next piece). The Night Circus contains a number of threaded stories that weave together into a beautiful, whole cloth. The book would have been great just getting to the circus or just with the character studies of the principles and the unfolding of their relationships. It would be a great novel simply living within the magical elements or immersed in the parties at la maison Lèfevre. Not only does it have all of these elements but weaves them together in a beautiful dance that provides a coherent overall show. Of course, don't take my stilted words for it but let's see a marvelous example: "The Cloud Maze An Excursion in Dimension A Climb Though the Firmament There Is No Beginning There Is No End Enter Where You Please Leave When You Wish Have No Fear of Falling Inside, the tent is dark-walled with an immense, iridescent white structure in the center. Bailey can think of nothing else to call it. It takes up the entirety of the tent save for a raised path along the perimeter, a winding loop that begins at the tent entrance and circles around. The floor beyond the path is covered with white spheres, thousands of them piled like soap bubbles. The tower itself is a series of platforms swooping in odd, diaphanous shapes, quite similar to clouds. They are layered, like a cake. From what Bailey can see, the space between layers varies from room enough to walk straight through to barely enough to crawl. Here and there parts of it almost float away from the central tower, drifting off into space."[i] I will not go into the storyline (see Amazon's synopsis here) in fear of given away the plot. I simply will conclude with unfettered praise for Ms. Morgenstern's writing; she is absolutely fabulous. A couple of side notes: I jumped between the Kindle edition of this and the audible (despite the fact that Whispersync for Voice isn't enable on the Windows Phone 8 app - I'm looking @ you Audible development team). Jim Dale (of Harry Potter fame) does a wonderful job reading The Night Circus. If you like listening to audiobooks, I highly recommend his work. The second note I wanted to make is that reading this work gives me hope for a more civil, connected public discourse in an increasingly divisive America. I suspect that Ms. Morgenstern and I have starkly different views of social, political and theological issues. I don't know this, but a New Englander that graduated from Smith would not share the same worldview with a conservative Christian living in the South. Despite this, Ms. Morgenstern draws me completely into her world; I absolutely connect with her in the portion of her thought life she makes available in her work. This encourage me. If we can connect, surely we Americans can connect with one another better, have a more civil discourse in those areas where we diverge and listen to one another more often. I don't anticipate that we would change each other's views; I do believe we can respect each other without doing so. There seems to be this thought the tolerance for one another depends or either not believing there is an objective truth ("what you believe is true for you but not me") or we should not be strong in our convictions (if you are, you're a fundamentalist). I would rather have us acknowledge our stark differences and firmly, but humbly, hold our beliefs and yet be civil to one another. The connection engendered by Ms. Morgenstern and her work gives me hope that this is possible. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [i] The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern, Kindle Edition, Location 3151

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern is about the series of events that take place within the confines of a circus that travels across the world and runs strictly at nighttime. While the setting is constantly changing as the circus travels, a bulk of the book takes place in London where one of the main characters, Marco, lives as well takes place mainly in the darkness of night in scenes surrounded by fantastical illusions and bizarre magic. The story follows most commonly the perspective of Marco and Celia, two competitor's fighting against one another to win a magic bound competition; however, in the events following their outrageous acts to outdo one another and the psychological torment the competition puts them through, the two end up falling deeply in love with one another. Celia's character can be very closed off from others and closedminded at times because of this; however, her bold curiosity and strength help demonstrate her character's growth throughout the book. Marco, on the other hand, continually struggles to find a place that he truly belongs and is accepted into throughout most of the book; however, the passion and care he holds for others, particularly Celia, portrays the depths of his character and what he values as most important in his life. The main conflict of this book is that the competition Marco and Celia battle through against each other ever since their childhoods can only have one winner, or rather one survivor, and so the two must decide what they are willing to sacrifice for one another as well as if they are willing to jeopardize the fate of the circus, in which so many depend on, in the process. Overall, I would say that the conflict is for the most part wrapped up at the end with little left for the audience to still wonder; however, the ending is not necessarily a happy ending as some characters are left with a lot having been sacrificed by the end of the book. Diving deeper into the central conflict of the book, early on in the novel both Marco and Celia are established as promising, young students of magic and illusion and are set against one another in a competition neither of them really know much about. Both of the two young students come from a rough past as Marco was an orphan and Celia had lost her mom to suicide. Finding purpose in training in magic for the competition seemed to help them cope with everything until the toll of the competition on one another started to destroy them. The conflict, I would argue, is not identified until later on in the book in which the two meet one another and start to fall for each other despite the inevitable odds of the competition. After fighting so long for themselves and pinning themselves away from others, Marco and Celia begin to open up to one another and find peace with their past in the face of a potential future with each other. Upon realization that there can only be one survivor, the two have to decide what they are willing to sacrifice for love and for each other. While this is occurring, simultaneously the circus is beginning to fall apart due to the deaths of two of the main founders and the conflict occurring between Marco and Celia. Ultimately, the fate of the circus is in Celia’s hands as she must decide how to hold it together for the sake of everyone involved in the circus and all that has been sacrificed because of it. These conflicts reveal patterns such as the bonfire of the circus. Once the light of the fire gives out, the circus is stopped and must be rekindled in order to thrive as it once did again. This theme of light in connection to magic demonstrates the darkness that exists in the world and the glimmer of hope the circus offers for so many of the characters throughout this book. A place in which people can turn to for fun and adventure during trying and dark times in their lives. The hope and opportunity of the circus portrays in this symbol of light to demonstrate the connection it serves to others who don’t fit in with the confines of the world around them. Furthermore, based on sociological perspective, this book can be portrayed as a representation of a world away from reality as the circus offers hope to those who otherwise deemed themselves to be hopeless or lost. Building off of this idea on an authorial level, it seems Morgenstern’s story seems to portray the human desire for love and acceptance. Although maybe not in the form magic in our present day world, the symbol of hope and having faith in something is often essential to our lives and the ways we choose to prioritize what we do and who we allow into our lives. As demonstrated throughout Marco and Celia’s conflict between love and competition, humans desire to be loved and to belong. Similar to Marco and Celia, we have to decide as humans what we are willing to sacrifice in order to honor and protect the love we carry for others and our beliefs. Although this book was beautifully written and filled with several deep metaphors and symbols, what was most difficult for me to overlook was the amount of holes in the plot that made it difficult to follow along with the characters and feel connected to them. There are a lot of third person perspectives throughout this story, which made it challenging for me to get a detailed grasp on a character as well as see them progressively grow. I would argue that a majority of the characters developed as the story went on, but not in a significant way that made to feel tied or drawn to the characters. I think the book mainly felt very rushed as there was a lot happening all at once, and it seemed like complex relationships such as Celia and her father as well as Bailey and Poppet were overlooked sometimes through the book due to the wide array of perspectives and characters thrown into the plot. I also would have liked to have had more chapters about Celia and Marco’s relationship as I felt there was still a lot I was left wondering by the end of the book such as what their lives are liked following the ending as well as what the ending really means for them and their future. Erin Morgenstern’s writing, however, is beautiful. The way in which she structured this story and created imagery was fantastic and consistently caught my eye while reading. While I think this book was good, I think there were a few things that also drew me away from it as well. On the other hand, I will most certainly be reading other books written by Morgenstern in the future as her writing style is truly amazing.

How does one review this intriguing book? I think I’d really like to meet Erin over a glass of wine to try to learn how she created this marvelous story. She obviously has a very interesting mind. I loved the story/characters and how the circus continually evolved. I’m going to read it again someday. And, Erin, I’m in Las Vegas.

Erin Morgenstern's "The Night Circus" is a captivating fantasy read for all those who ever thought the circus was as mysterious and amazing as it was otherworldly. It evoked memories of going to the circus as a child and then enhanced and magnified those childhood feelings of awe and wonderment. Magicians are often a favorite entertainer of children and adults alike, and Morgenstern's portrayal of a magical traveling circus and the underlying reason it exists in the first place is perfection. The characters are well developed and easy to become attached to and spark a strong emotional response with the reader. The author's writing style is easy to read but descriptive and immersive and kept the pages turning. Morgenstern's creativity and imagery is as fascinating as it is fantastical, and I especially loved discovering each and every newly added tent in the circus. The Night Circus is a must read for fantasy lovers who enjoy a suspenseful and thrilling ride all the way to the end of the book.

The Circus arrives without warning. I really liked this story with its imaginative flair, a flair for the wonderful and fantastical. It's a lovely fairy tale with a touch of well- placed romance but also about the fantastic in our lives. It's a well-structured meandering story, we visit the circus as events unfold in it and as it begins to unravel. It's storytelling where you are inside of things, a microcosm built of wonder and intrigue and the protagonists strive to find a way out to forge their own path, their happiness; in general to make their own choice at last. But to gain something, they must lose something else. Is the price too high? You decide. -the plot revolves around a bet, a game of wits between old adversaries who choose to imprison two young people in an impossible situation. it propels the story forward, we observe how the game affects not only the chosen ones, Marco and Ceila but others around them - I loved this -also loved how we travel with the circus in space and time , meeting ensemble cast, seeing how the lore of the circus spreads and grows, what it brings to people outside the circus -the descriptions of the circus are wonderful, you feel the sense of wonder - I love how Ceila and Marco fall in love, that was a very palpable connection between them, and I was happy they found their freedom from roles neither of them ever wanted and that freedom was in each other. -the ending brings more to the table and all in all I'd say it's a thoughtful fairy tale. Note that while Ceila, Marco and others were absolutely lovely, it's not a story you will remember for characters, but for the central idea and some considerations about storytelling and where events take the characters. The circus is central to everything, the circus is the main character as well as the field, where everything happens: the wonders, but also how those wonders affect others. The central idea was super and I loved meandering through the circus, loved observing the game and loved how the game turned into a desire to give and collaborate; that Marco and Ceila couldn't help but fall in love and that feeling helped them challenge the game and build a collaboration instead. It's a pleasant read, the game propels the plot and you are drawn into the night circus , enjoying all it has to offer, you cheer for Marco and Ceila and for the supporting characters. Ordered a physical copy and going to enjoy the love story in the night circus again. It's a good read for when you look for something magical and fairy tale like.