**/5
"There is so much that glows in the circus, from flames to lanterns to stars."
Book Review (Minor Spoilers):
I really, really wanted to enjoy this book. I saw it plastered over bookstagram accounts, and when I found it at the bookstore, I was sold by the promise of a "duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors." I mean, a high stakes competition between two magicians under the guise of a circus? In the late 1800s? Sounds like a dream come true, so sign me up!
This book was written in present tense. Think, "He sees her walking. She lifts her skirts and runs through the rain." This was such a unique decision and was truly the best. It gave the book such a romantic tone simply from the tense, and even made the very words on the page feel magical, as if you were watching them unfold before your eyes. *sighs dreamily* The very first page of the book is written in second person, with "you" being the main subject. It is very rare to find books written in this way, even in a small part. It added to the immersion of the story and sucked me in.
You're introduced to the two players of this game in the first 35 pages. Each chapter varies in length and doesn't have chapter numbers, but it does have chapter titles as well as locations and timestamps to keep the reader grounded in where the story is. After the first 100 pages, however, the story jumps from 1886 to 1902 with no explanation, and then back to 1886. The book then starts to slowly jump around different years to weave together a second story line that will come together with the main characters later in the book. The game is set up between two other individuals, who have initiated this game before several times. The rules seem simple, but it is never truly explained what all of the rules are, and neither Celia or Marco are really sat down to have the stakes explained. Their teachers are constantly reprimanding them for not playing the game correctly, but neither teacher will actually communicate to his student what is expected, only that they must win.
The circus is truly magical, with some traditional circus acts you would expect like a contortionist as well as animals, but several unique magical tents/rooms as well. These were my favorite part of the book. They included a hallway of snow, a room with walls of stars, a room of jars filled with scents of memories. It truly added to the atmosphere of the book and I honestly could have been lost in these magical exhibits for hours.
However, I expected a serious magical battle from the synopsis on the back, but the two players, Celia and Marco, only start interacting with each other face to face from page 270 and on. They've met briefly on a couple occasions earlier in the book, but their "moves" in the game are all surrounding the circus: the flame that burns at the entrance of the circus, the various magical tents. There are no flaming fireballs being tossed at each other as a circus attraction like I expected it to be. "Marco constructs tiny rooms from scraps of paper. Hallways and doors crafted from pages of books and bits of blueprints, pieces of wallpaper and fragments of letters. He composes chambers that lead into others that Celia has created. Stairs that wind around her halls. Leaving spaces open for her to respond."
While this was a very magical way of inspiring the competition, the "high stakes" from the synopsis really don't feel real until much later in the book. From page 384 to 487, I was turning pages ravenously because it was in these hundred pages that you really felt the stakes rise on the competition. People were getting hurt, some dying, and chapters began ending on cliffhangers. This felt like such an action-filled part of the story that didn't fit with the rest before that was slow, rich, and romantic in its language.
I honestly loved the first 40 or so pages and the last 150. The middle part of this book, while I understood what Morgenstern was doing with building her circus, characters, and world, I was bored out of my mind. I truly expected something completely different in this book. The romance felt far to "insta-love" for me once they finally started interacting with each other in person instead of "making moves" in the game from afar.
This was still a beautifully written book and I really struggled with my feelings over it. I loved Morgenstern's artistic choices of tense and the second person interjections where you as the reader feel you're actually attending the circus. However, I still felt that the synopsis was not an accurate interpretation of the flow of the book itself, and it was rich with a lot of setting development and character building without feeling like it was moving the plot along with the game itself.
Would I Let My Child Read This?
Honestly, yes. There was one iteration of the f-word in the first couple pages but then nothing else afterward, so it definitely seemed out of place. The romance did take a more sensual turn later in the book, but it was fairly clean with no explicit descriptions.
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