Braddy Reads The Night Circus

I don’t think I’m much of a romantic.

Or maybe this just wasn’t that much of a romance.

Or maybe the main characters in romance novels are ^%#in’ IDIOTS.

Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus is one of the upcoming selections from my book club (and I’ve GOT to start taking these books at a slower pace). It’s billed as a romance novel, but there’s significantly more going on between these covers than a love story.

Was… was that a euphemism?

*ahem* So the story follows two young people who have been snared into some kind of magic competition by a couple of meddling old wizards. The terms of the duel are never really clearly stated, but the venue for the competition is pretty clearly established: each of the competitors makes subtle, but magnificent, adjustments to a traveling circus.

And, as so often happens, the competitors fall in love.

I don’t know why this particular couple bugged me so much. There are plenty of other romantic couples in fiction that are infinitely more annoying, but something about the way these two go about things just frustrates me. They wrap up a lot of innocent people in their duel and manage to ruin their lives pretty thoroughly. They even get a couple of people killed.

Oh, wait, they feel sorry for it in the end? Well, that makes it all better.

Well, now that I’m done kvetching, let me say that I actually LIKED this book quite a bit. Not a whole lot, but enough that I’m really glad I read it. It's kind of a terrible romance, but as a period fantasy, it's excellent. I mean, the setting is... Oh, the setting is really good.

See, Morgenstern’s got a knack for place description, and she sets up the circus BEAUTIFULLY. You can tell she was trying to craft a place of transcendental wonder, and she was trying really, really hard. And doggone it, she succeeded.

The Night Circus isn’t a book I plan on re-reading much, but I imagine I’ll crack open the pages a time or two to get a sense of what that wonderful circus is like. Les Cirque des Rêves really does wind up being a dreamlike place. Frankly, I want to re-read those sections a bit more, just to see how Morgenstern did it.

One last note (and maybe I’m the only person who thinks of this): There’s a scene where our two lovers consummate their relationship. At that moment, the narration states that, “though there are a great many fragile objects” in the room, “nothing breaks.” Now, there are completely legitimate reasons for pointing this out within the context of the novel. However, I can’t help but read that line as a sort of “take that” against the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn in particular.

Man, for someone who’s never read the series, I know WAY too much about Twilight.