In Night Circus you enter a place like no where you have ever imagined.  Morgenstern creates a magical and elusive story that portrays a reality that seems not quite real and yet in its essence is profoundly true.

Le Cirque des Rêves,  a circus with black and white tents, appears without any announcement. The tents appear early in the morning and then after dark the circus opens to the delight of all who come.  It casts a strange spell on people who see the amazing performances underneath those striped canopies at night.  But little do they know of the fierce competition that is being played out within these magical walls, between two magicians as they try to win a competition set up by their elusive mentors.

Morgenstern creates such a magical place, peopled with many interesting characters, but in reality the most interesting and compelling character is the circus itself with it’s many mysteries like the Cloud Maze and the amazing acrobats who perform stunts over the heads of the crowd.  Celia and Marco our main characters do come to life, especially in the latter half of the book as they discover the mystery that surrounds the competition and the limits of the world that they inhabit.  As they begin to fall in love, they also begin to see the dangerous consequences that their magic has on the lives of the people who are a part of their world and they struggle to find a way to  be together even as they try to save the circus.

I found this book a bit slow at the beginning, with lots of descriptions of the circus but as I got farther into it the characters emerged more fully and I was glad to have kept going!

Brenda”s Rating: ***1/2 (31/2 out of 5 Stars)

Recommend this book to: Lauren and Marian

Book Study worthy? No

Read in ebook format.