The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
I shouldn't have liked this book. Honestly, it's not my thing. The plot was weak, the characters were flat, and the justification around the main conflict in the novel was like bland rice. But, I couldn't put it down. I suppose it's a testament to the prose. Morgenstern's ability to tell a story bypassed the fact that the story she was telling wasn't very good.
The tricky part to The Night Circus is explaining the plot out loud makes one look like an idiot. There's a circus, and there are magicians, and the magicians fall in love, but are bound to the circus, and then there are these twins. See? It's difficult to boil the plot down into it's specific elements. As much as Night Circus wants to be a love story, it's also very much a story about magic. However, and this is not the best way to go about it, the book attempts to deny that the system of magic it is using is indeed MAGIC. This becomes a bit frustrating as time goes by.
Another issue is that Morgenstern's characters are really flat. As a novel progresses I expect some sort of growth. Not in the Night Circus. The characters end where they began. Their flaws are still glaring and they don't appear to have learned a thing. This is equally as frustrating as the magic denial.
With all that being said, The Night Circus is compelling. Morgenstern knows how to construct a novel. She doesn't linger in areas and chapters are kept short. What really saved Morgenstern is that she decided to construct her novel out of time sequence. So, as the reader gets frustrated in one area the chapter ends and then one is thrust into another. It really saved the entire story from tedium. Honestly, the whole thing read more like a movie script or a play. I can absolutely see this story being adapted by HBO or by a budding film maker. It could easily be spun into a series or a film.
My next book is Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse. This book has recently been translated into English, and has been a cornerstone of Japanese Science Fiction since the 1960s. I'm so excited to read it.
I shouldn't have liked this book. Honestly, it's not my thing. The plot was weak, the characters were flat, and the justification around the main conflict in the novel was like bland rice. But, I couldn't put it down. I suppose it's a testament to the prose. Morgenstern's ability to tell a story bypassed the fact that the story she was telling wasn't very good.
The tricky part to The Night Circus is explaining the plot out loud makes one look like an idiot. There's a circus, and there are magicians, and the magicians fall in love, but are bound to the circus, and then there are these twins. See? It's difficult to boil the plot down into it's specific elements. As much as Night Circus wants to be a love story, it's also very much a story about magic. However, and this is not the best way to go about it, the book attempts to deny that the system of magic it is using is indeed MAGIC. This becomes a bit frustrating as time goes by.
Another issue is that Morgenstern's characters are really flat. As a novel progresses I expect some sort of growth. Not in the Night Circus. The characters end where they began. Their flaws are still glaring and they don't appear to have learned a thing. This is equally as frustrating as the magic denial.
With all that being said, The Night Circus is compelling. Morgenstern knows how to construct a novel. She doesn't linger in areas and chapters are kept short. What really saved Morgenstern is that she decided to construct her novel out of time sequence. So, as the reader gets frustrated in one area the chapter ends and then one is thrust into another. It really saved the entire story from tedium. Honestly, the whole thing read more like a movie script or a play. I can absolutely see this story being adapted by HBO or by a budding film maker. It could easily be spun into a series or a film.
My next book is Ten Billion Days and One Hundred Billion Nights by Ryu Mitsuse. This book has recently been translated into English, and has been a cornerstone of Japanese Science Fiction since the 1960s. I'm so excited to read it.
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