The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Title: The Night Circus

Author: Erin Morgenstern (American, 1978- )
Originally published: 2011

Page count: 488

Dates read: 3/22/23-4/3/23

2023 book goal progress: 8 out of 23

From my TBR shelf

Read my other book reviews for my 2023 goals HERE.




Description of book:

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.

First sentences:
"The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not."

Favorite quotes:

"The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones."

"Are we going to discuss whatever it is you are here to discuss instead of dancing around it? I was never a particularly good dancer."

"It is difficult to see a situation for what it is when you are in the midst of it. It is too familiar. Too comfortable."

CAWPILE Rating: Overall - 4.1/10 - ⭐⭐/5
Characters      - 6
Atmosphere   - 7
Writing Style - 2
Plot                - 3
Intrigue          - 4
Logic             - 3
Enjoyment     - 4
What is a CAWPILE Rating?

Review:

I did not like this book. At its best (and there were some good parts), it had wonderful, magical circus tents/acts (translation: flashy gimmicks to distract the reader from the fact that the story itself is quite mediocre). At its worst, I didn't feel for the characters (or circus) enough to care about their outcomes no matter how dire the circumstances were. Most of it was just confusing and frustrating due to the ambiguity regarding the rules of the 'game' and that it's not written in chronological order. Let's break it down a bit more...

Magic and the 'game' - Magic is real, but most people don't know it still exists. Yet every time someone is told it's more than just a show and the magic is real, no one seems all that surprised and just accepts it without question. Annoying. Two multiple-centuries old magicians each take on a student to raise them, train them in magic, and then let them duel it out to see who's better and, really, whose school of thought is better. One teaches secrecy and learning from old books, runes, and dead languages. The other teaches flashy performance, and learning from your natural ability and power within. Neither school of magic goes into detail about how it works - it just happens. It leaves much to be desired.

The rules - The rules of the game are very ambiguous, yet from the beginning it is implied that the game won’t end until one of the two students dies. This comes as a huge shock to the main characters when they discover that at the end of the book, but was a letdown to me as a reader since I knew it from the beginning. I was waiting for other rules to become known or clarified that would change my understanding, as a reader, of the game - but that never happened. It was only ambiguous to the characters and not to the reader, which is disappointing.

The chronology - This book spans 1873-1903 and jumps all over the place time-wise (and location-wise, but that doesn’t really matter since, for the most part, the location is the ‘circus’ and the city/country is irrelevant) and it destroyed the story for me. In the beginning, I would flip to earlier chapters to reread them to make sure I understood the timeline. Then, as I got further into the book, that became impractical. I instead started taking notes of dates and key events. That got to be annoying, so I just stopped and ended the book not knowing if so-and-so knows their opponent yet, if so-and-so has expressed their romantic feelings for someone, if so-and-so has died, and so on. I just didn’t care anymore. 

I wish it was written in chronological order with more of the tents and circus acts written in as normal chapters (not identified as separate parts of the story), so I felt like I wasn’t sure what was real or not. Instead, the method of being written in non-chronological order kept me from being immersed in the story. I wanted to get lost in the dream/fantasy of the circus, not focus on mixed-up dates. For most of the book, I was simply trying to keep the story straight in my head, which was incredibly frustrating

The characters - Everyone in the book is eccentric in their own way and has unique abilities - it is a circus, after all. The thing is, there are SO many characters and you jump from one perspective to the next that you don’t really get to know (or get attached to) any of the characters. I wanted someone to root for and I didn’t get that. Once you get past the individual eccentricities, you realize that all the characters are pretty one-dimensional. Yet another disappointment.

The circus - The circus is only open at night and is monochromatic in color. The entire circus is black and white with shades of gray/silver mixed in. It’s a neat concept but I don’t think you ever really get an idea of the scope and how the circus grows. It just starts and all of a sudden there’s so much to it that there’s always more to explore. I would’ve liked to see the small circus in the beginning and be able to compare it to this huge, fantastical circus in the end - but it starts ‘big’ and stays ‘big,’ the growth isn’t really included in the story. Again, I wanted to get lost in the circus, and there were short chapters describing different tents, but I wanted many more and longer descriptions. 

The title - The book is called The Night Circus, which makes sense regarding the time the circus is open… but the circus is actually called Le Cirque des Rêves, which translates to The Circus of Dreams, which I think would’ve been a much better title.

The ending - It seemed very rushed and forced. Most of the ending was due to the actions of minor characters and the major characters had little to do with it, which didn’t make much sense to me. Half the circus is powered by a magical bonfire and the other half is powered by a magician. The bonfire goes out and the magician can no longer power the circus, so a solution needs to be found. The solution is to give instructions to a 16-year-old kid (who just learned magic is real, never mind practicing it himself, who happened to run away to the circus) on how to relight the bonfire and then pass the rest of the magic to him, so he can run/own the circus. He’s told he isn’t this specially chosen person to take over the circus, he’s just there at the right time - even though it was foretold through the reading of tarot cards and the stars. So he was fated to do it, but that’s just written off. 

The contortionist, fortune teller, or either/both of the kitten trainers would have been a better fit to take over the circus due to having practiced magic and having been a part of the circus from the beginning. The main characters tell the boy he has a choice, which he has to make at that moment and, when he agrees, magically binds him for life to it which seemed very out of character and ruined the ending even more for me. Most of the book is just a nice fluffy story and then the very, very end became extremely existential and it did not seem like it belonged with the rest of the book.

OK, I think I’ve ranted long enough about this book. I haven’t read many books set in a circus, but surely there are better-written circus stories out there. I KNOW there are better books that involve magic. Don’t waste your time reading this one - you’ve already wasted enough time on the book reading this review.

Now I'm off to read another book... but since a review should be more about the author of the book than about the writer of the blog, I will let Erin Morgenstern have the last words:

"People are naive about many things. And they would rather write them off as evil than attempt to understand them. An unfortunate truth, but a truth nonetheless."