Chapter One Hundred Seventy-Nine: The Night Circus

So I read Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus about a month ago, before embarking on vacation (and actually ended up having a great conversation with the woman across the aisle from me on the plane when she saw me finishing it).  I don't know why it's taken me so long to write about it here, because I really enjoyed it and would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a good solid fantastic love story about dueling magicians who just happen to be star-crossed lovers.  Set in the years around the fin de siècle, this story, told from multiple perspectives and not entirely chronologically, follows the movements of and main players in a literally magical circus.  The characters are vivid, the setting is engrossing, the plot is original--the whole book is really almost too atmospheric, but stops just short of being overdone and instead just creates this fantastic world that's a pleasure to inhabit for the course of the book.  (It reminds me a bit of The Swan Gondola--which I reviewed on this blog in August 2014--but where The Swan Gondola did go just that bit overboard in being atmospheric, The Night Circus gets the blend of atmosphere and action just right.  If you liked The Swan Gondola, though, do check out The Night Circus, and vice versa.)  I was so eager to find out how things would end that I couldn't read the last quarter of the book fast enough, and at some point I'd like to go back and re-read the book with a bit more of an eye toward its many details, now that the fever of wanting to know what will happen has been broken.  For an engaging and entertaining work of fantasy--or maybe magical realism is more accurate, actually--that combines intrigue and romance, take a look at The Night Circus.