The Night Circus

Erin Morgenstern
Completed 6/25/2023, Reviewed 6/25/2023
4 stars

Another circus themed book, this one was a book club selection.  It was fantasy based, whereas The Circus Infinite was science fiction.  I really liked this book, though I had trouble following the timelines and the multitude of characters in the beginning.  By the end, I was hooked and stayed up until four in the morning finishing the last hundred pages.  I thought this book was very creative.  The only thing I didn’t like about it was the time period.  The late 1800’s is not my favorite.  I generally don’t like the stuffiness of Victorian stories and often find the prose to be cold because of that.  Fortunately, the book finished with a lot of expressed emotions.  I guess I’m just a hopeless romantic, always looking for some kind of passion I can empathize with.  This book won the 2012 Locus First Novel Award and was nominated for several others. 

The book follows Celia and Marco, two magic wielders apprenticed to different master magicians.  At a very early age, their masters lock them into a contest whose rules and setting are not revealed, though the stakes are their very lives.  When they grow into adulthood, they both become involved in a magical circus which becomes the venue for the competition.  After a time, they fall in love, find out the stakes, and must deal with the implications as it not only affects them, but the other performers and customers alike.

I found most of the characters to be interesting, but none of them really drew me in until about halfway through the book.  That’s when Celia and Marco start becoming angry at their master over the lack of information.  Their feelings start to come out and they become more fleshed out as real people.  My favorite characters, though, were Poppet and Widget, twins born on the grand opening day of the circus, and Bailey, an American boy infatuated with the circus who wants to go to Harvard but is being forced to take over the family farm.  As children, they were much easier to warm up to, and as they grew, they remained three-dimensional.  

The circus itself is basically a character as well.  It has a magical life breathed into it which makes it incredibly popular.  The Cirque des Rêves, or the Circus of Dreams, is only open at night and no one ever sees it come into a city, be erected, taken down, or leave.  It has one tent for each feature, like the magic of Celia, the Wishing Tree, the Tarot reader, the Hall of Mirrors, the Labyrinth, and the garden made of ice.  I really loved the descriptions of each tent.  Morgenstern breathed life into each one with her prose.  The circus seems to be tied to Marco and Celia, not just as a venue for their competition.  Their emotions, their very lives, in fact, have a direct effect on the stability of the circus.  

I was impressed by the prose.  It was good without being pretentious, which I feel happens so easily with Victorian era stories.  And the world building, or in this case, circus building, was stunning.  I was worried this would be a Cirque de Soliel rip off, but it was so much more than that. It’s not a traditional circus, but the imagination that went into crafting it was excellent.

I give this book four stars out of five.  I’m interested in how the book club will react to this book.  Already, some comments have been posted that the book is ponderous and pretentious.  Occasionally, I felt it dragged, especially towards the beginning.  It could have shed maybe fifty pages.  But I thought it was great.