The Night Circus

Blog review: https://trishadoeseverythingbutstudy2.wordpress.com/2020/12/31/my-october-in-boo...

Well, I didn't hate it, but it was a close thing.

The main problem with this book is that it's f*cking long. It might not be the longest book I've read (hello Priory Of The Orange Tree which I preferred to this one), but it was just long.

The writing is beautiful. No doubt of it. But it requires you to be paying complete attention, which is not possible for me if I'm already bored by the nothing-makes-any-sense-right-now. You need to be reading between the lines, and then between the lines you've already read between, so it's just so complicated. Half of the time I was like, do I even know this character? Where did you come from? Aren't you supposed to be a teenager? Aren't you already born? Where are half the characters? Do I know you, or are you another one of the characters I've already confused with another? What does that mean? What does that mean? Is that character dead? Did I miss a few chapters or something?

It's like if you skip two words in a sentence, and you have to keep scratching your head trying to figure out whether you've heard of that word or not. I'm seriously glad I had the ebook, so I could search for a phrase that was supposed to be important.

After you get past all the confusion, this book is really good. Like some of the best fiction I've ever read. I liked the romance, but not as much as I should have. I mainly just loved Bailey's perspective, because that was making the most sense to me, probably because that was the only perspective where a single character was not present in multiple timelines.

I have this problem, I miss chapter titles. It's an unconscious habit, but I always skip chapter titles, since I'm really focused on the story. In this book, that habit came back to bite me. The problem, you see, is in the fact that years, are only mentioned in chapter titles. So, you miss the chapter title, you're fumbling around for quite a while, trying to figure out why something hasn't already happened.

The reason this got 3 stars instead of two, was that ending. Not the last chapter, that one was okay, but I loved the chapter before last.The one with Widget being the one telling the story, and that too to Alexander(I think). I had goosebumps throughout that chapter, and the ones before that one too. The relighting, the Marco and Celia finally having a happy ending; I was really close to crying.

Overall a nice book. Just not for me to love. I recommend it to people who have lots of patience, can keep track of multiple timelines, do not get confused easily, can read between the lines, can infer stuff not said, but understood, and who like beautiful writing that paints wonderful pictures in your head. ( )

I wish this story was about four times as long. I wanted to see more context and progress in the time jumps between different portions of the story. It was tough for me to follow or care about the overall progress of the plot when the scenes were presented so much out of order. ( )

Oh man, I liked this book so much. The descriptions and the characters and the storytelling, in general, made me very happy. it reminded me of [b:The Bear and the Nightingale|25489134|The Bear and the Nightingale|Katherine Arden|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1470731420s/25489134.jpg|45268929] in the way it was told - vivid descriptions and lots of characters which were slowly revealed. I got a little choked up when the last words were spoken simply because it was over.

I did have a hard time keeping the years straight at some points but toward the last third of the book or so, I figured out that I needed to pay closer attention to it and then I was good to go.

Beautiful book. ( )

Two duelling magicians each pits a chosen student against the other's student with the Night Circus as the arena for the game to play out.

Wonderfully atmospheric storytelling, pulling the reader along easily to the point that even the occasional anachronism really doesn't matter. All the stars. ( )

This book started out so well, and started getting so good, but the ending really flopped for me. I felt it lacked the magic and mystery that most of the book had and honestly made the whole three days I spent reading it feel a little wasted. ( )