The Night Circus

Dear Becca,

I had high hopes for The Night Circus since it was the catalyst for starting this blog and I am happy to say that it did not disappoint. Admittedly, I didn’t know much about the actual storyline before I decided I wanted to read the book. I just knew that it was a debut novel about a very mysterious circus and had gotten excellent reviews. The Night Circus was much darker than I anticipated but luckily it did not have a noticeable impact on my dreams, as many novels have been known to do. The story was fast paced enough to keep my attention during the Bart rides to work and I finished it within two weeks.

Since I had so little knowledge of the plot going into it, I didn’t realize that a romance is so central to the plot. (Had I known this, I would have been all the more eager to read it!) I don’t want to give away too much, but I felt like the real romance developed relatively late in novel and I would have enjoyed seeing more of it. I’ll be curious to hear your feelings on this.

I was very pleased with the narrative style, an omniscient narrator who focuses on different characters in the circus as needed. I was desperately trying to avoid a Dickens comparison, but I’m just not going to be able to do that. The narration feels Dickensian in that it follows each character just enough so that you get a good sense of the community and a vivid impression of everyone important within it and how they weave together. Just as the circus goers are lost in the world of the Night Circus, I was lost in it as well.

Have you read Water for Elephants? At first, The Night Circus reminded me of Water for Elephants because you are so immersed in the life and background of the circus, which turns out to be quite dark in both situations. However, as the novel progressed, it reminded me more and more of The Time Traveler’s Wife, which is also dark in its own way. Like Clare and Henry’s, Celia and Marco’s relationship face many challenges, challenges that are more supernatural than those that most normal relationships have to face. Yet another similarity, though, was the manipulation of time and how the narrative bounces back and forth between years. I would be curious to re-read the book and read the chapters in chronological order.

Speaking of which, the fact that the chapters jump around between different time periods was actually my major pet peeve with this book. It’s worth the work, trying to figure out which year you’re in and it’s really not terribly difficult to keep track of, but as a fairly lazy reader, I prefer to sit back and read the novel straight through, without having to think that hard when this is all taking places. Instead, I felt like I was getting jolted back and forth from one year to the next. It works quite well though, always keeping you a little bit lost. Just like you are in the circus!

I think you’re really going to like this one!

Until we read again,

Megan