RATING: ★★★★★
I'm out of my reading slump! After a solid two months of barely any reading, I finished three books in one week! There's no better feeling than finally returning to so many books and stories and to be able to really enjoy reading them. The first book that I read is The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Now I know the hype train for this book is long gone (if you read the book, you'll catch the joke!), but I couldn't resist finally reading it too.
The Night Circus is the story of a circus that travels around the world and is only open at night. However, this is not a normal circus. It always shows up unexpected, is completely black and white and contains many tents with wonders so magical that you can't be sure if they aren't true magic.
What I loved about this story is the originality. Everyone has some memory of childhood that includes circus and how magical they are. I remember that I always felt like they just showed up, as in the story, and were completely unannounced. While that certainly wasn't true, I like that the book played with that element. As a child, everything in a circus seems magical and I love the idea of a place like that for adults.
Even though the book is about the circus, the key plot line is a romance story. Both Celia and Marco are magicians, trained from childhood to compete with each other in a battle that can only have one of them win. Their playground? The circus. The complication? They love each other.
Both Marco and Celia are well-rounded characters and very enjoyable to read. Throughout the story, we work towards one big climax and in the beginning this was a little confusing. There were many characters that seemed vague and unnecessary, but it all tied in in the end. The only real complaint I can have about this book is that the real plot twist could be spotted from a mile away and thus made some of the emotions of Marco and Celia fall a little flat. When they found out and were all shocked, all I could think was 'but they MUST have known this, right?'. They didn't.
But if I nitpick about something like that in my review, it can only mean one thing: I really enjoyed this story. The setting and descriptions were amazing and though I'm not as entranced as some other readers by the love story, I did genuinely enjoy reading about Celia and Marco and their relationship. It's not always straightforward and its complexity is a thing of beauty.