The Night Circus

Novel by Erin Morgenstern

This book is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Admittedly, I read it too quickly. I always do. And I skipped ahead to the ending when I was about halfway through. I usually do that, too. But it's more than those reader-errors that make it tantalizingly confusing.

The storyline jumps around in time, not like in a Kate Morton book with multiple narrators and time periods, but like The Time Traveler's Wife, where it's all about one story and one set of characters but shows their lives at different times. You really must read the chapter titles.

No wonder my middle school student, who recommended it to me, is having a hard time understanding it.

Put off? Wait--the good side of the mystery, the tantalizing part, is still to come.

Also mysterious to me are the descriptions of the circus tents. See, this is about a circus that performs only at night, doesn't announce where it is going next, and is actually run by two dueling magicians who eventually fall in love (no plot spoilers there--it's all on the back cover). So the circus tents sometimes contain amazing but expected circus acts, and sometimes reveal mystical experiences like a wishing tree lit with candles or bottles of scents from your dreams or a vertical maze leading into the sky. And it's real magic, very Harry Potter-esque. Oh, and it's all in black and white and gray, often looking like ice or snow or white fire or pages torn from books or folded paper. The descriptions alone are mind boggling. I can see why it's being made into a movie--it'll be a visual masterpiece. As a book it's hard for me to picture sometimes.

The book also constantly reminded me of something I couldn't quite put my finger on. There are obvious Shakespeare references, to Prospero the Enchanter and Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. It also reminded me a little of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked this Way Comes (which in itself is a reference to Shakespeare). And I've already mentioned The Time Traveler's Wife and Harry Potter. But there's more to it than that--it just seems very familiar and yet elusive at the same time. Like the mazes and illusions and charms in the book itself. It just turns in on itself constantly.

Yet I liked it. I was drawn into the mystery, I liked the right characters and hated the right characters (don't you just despise when there's no one worth loving or hating in a book?). It was a little slow in the middle but the end galloped along like a gryphon on the enchanted carousel. And all along the way it gives you a spine tingling sense of something...something...well, watch the book trailer at the bottom of Erin Morgenstern's website and you'll see what I mean.