“The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.”
If the first page of this book does not draw you in I will be amazed. I have heard about this book for a while now and have often found myself in the book shoppe caressing it, holding the pages to my face and breathing in its very essence. Yet, I always place it back on the shelf, saying to myself soon, soon I will come back and you will be mine.
Then I joined a Goodreads Group ‘The Popularity Contest’ I finally was forced to buy it and it proved every bit as magical as I had hoped.
Morgenstern weaved an enchanting story, pulling the reader in with every turn of the page. Just when you thought you had the story figured out, she proved you wrong.
What I liked about this story is that it was not first and foremost a “love” story. Too often, for me, this is the case in books and I like how that took a backseat to circus.
There were, however, a few things that muddled my mind as I read. One was the date hopping. I had to go back more than a few time to review what year I had been in the last chapter, or what year these particular characters where in the last time I was reading about them. Another would be the name hopping… at one point she would refer to someone as, for instance, Mr. Barris and another time as Ethan. Which normally is not such a big deal, but there are a lot of characters in this book and this only confused things.
Morgenstern’s writing reminds me of my own; she even uses one of my favourite way of saying ‘except’…”save”. However, I feel that she overused this expression and on a number of occasions could have reworded her sentences better and avoided it. Mostly though the language proved to be fresh and interesting and I reveled in her descriptions of the circus… to the point that I even visited the circus in my dreams.
After reading this book there is only one thing I want… and that is more! I want to learn what happens to Baily and Poppet… and Chandresh… all of them. There is more story to tell here and I hope that Ms. Morgenstern continues to tell it.
Confessions of a Bibliophile... 