Book #86: The Night Circus

Book #86: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

May 2, 2014


It's been a rough week for me. On the work front, things were just plain crazy there. I'm very glad it's Friday night, and I have the weekend ahead of me to mellow out. But I also have my graduate coursework to attend to, the bulk of that being my comps. But in two months, I'll be done with grad school. It's all good; even though it was a rough week, it's nothing I can't handle. I just haven't had much time to read.

The Night Circus was charming, but I'm bothered by some things. The biggest issue, I guess, is that the nature of Celia and Marco's challenge (the fact that one of them had to die in order for it to end) was supposed to be some huge secret through much of the book, but it was actually kind of predictable. I think Morgenstern should have put all the cards on the table from the start. I think having it be out in the open would have balanced out the tension in this book. It was both dark and whimsical, but not really in a way that worked for me.

I didn't feel much connection with the main characters. Though this book is nearly 400 pages on the Kindle edition that I read, it jumped around in perspective so much that I hardly connected with anyone, except maybe the Murray twins and Bailey, the outsider who ultimately saves the circus. Maybe the book would have worked better if Morgenstern had gone in completely the opposite direction, and had told it from the perspective of the seer twins, Poppet and Widget. They could have pieced together the truth behind the workings of the circus, while taking the reader through all of the fabulous tents.

In spite of what I believe to be the faults of the story, the circus at the heart of it is fun to imagine. I love the brief second-person sections, and I imagined myself as a rêveur dressed in black with a red scarf. Had the book consisted only of descriptions of the circus, with Bailey's story included with some details tweaked, it would have been a perfect, delightful read.