I Just Read....

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. (http://erinmorgenstern.com)

Rating: 3/5

This book centres around a circus that is, at its core, a playground for a game between two magicians. The magicians have been chosen by their father-like figures to compete in a game of magic until there is only one winner. The circus acts as their canvas where they design different tents and spectacles, attempting to out-do the other person.

The book continually jumps between the story of these two magicians, the creation of the circus and its history, the story of a child named Bailey, and a second-person narrative describing the circus. I believe that only two of these intersecting stories were successful.

The second-person description of the circus (written as if the reader was experiencing a night at the circus) was, in my opinion, the most successful portion of the story. The circus comes alive in these parts of the book, which are few and far between (too far for my liking). The detail of the circus and the imagery of the different tents made me want to go to this circus. I felt that the overall plot of this book fell quite flat but the overwhelming sense of wonder and excitement that was created through the night circus was enough to keep me interested. Part of what I found so interesting about the circus comes from the inspiration behind it. The author cites the theatre company Punchdrunk (punchdrunk.org.uk) as her inspiration behind creating the night circus. It seems as though the show in particular she was inspired by was their immersive theatre production called Sleep No More (sleepnomorenyc.com.) I have had the pleasure of seeing this production (expect a full blog post about this later) on multiple occasions so while reading the book I had a pretty good idea of what the author was trying to achieve with the circus, and I thought she did a wonderful job.

I also loved the storyline concerning the child named Bailey. At the beginning of the book, he is one of us. He  is an outsider, unaware of the effects of the night circus. He is just a kid who wants to go to the circus, and what he finds there changes the course of this life. I found this storyline to be quite riveting and as I was reading I was continually excited to go back to his portions of the book.

As for the rest of the book, I really wanted to like it but I thought it fell short. The competition between magicians was never fully explained (there was a brief explanation but it was not given enough time) and the creation of the circus was quite interesting but I felt that more detail and background would have been beneficial. The author introduced many characters that were crucial to creating the circus but never really fleshed them out. I often found myself wanting to skip over chapters when these secondary characters where the main focus.

Overall, I gave the book a 3/5 rating. I thought that the concept was very good but was lacking in execution. Although the chapters describing the circus almost made up for all the shortcomings, they were that good.