The circus arrives without warning.
I absolutely loved this novel, and I think it’s been by far my favorite novel of 2014. Maybe I just needed an extremely fantasy world to escape to, or maybe it’s because I am a dreamer by nature and reading this world just hit my inner love of dreams and escape on a very real level. Whatever the case may be, this novel was near perfection for me. Erin Morgenstern weaves a tale so beautiful, that I fell in love with it every step of the way, and was praying that the novel would magically add another 100 pages to it; unfortunately it did not.
The Night Circus is primarily about a competition, and while I understood some of the essence of the competition, until I fully grasped its true nature, I still loved Prospero, and he was one of my favorite characters. Maybe I was slow on the uptake of the competition’s true ending, but when I discovered it, I was extremely upset and felt lied to by Prospero, and he is now one of my least favorite characters...ever.
The Night Circus is also a love story. One that surrounds our two competitors, Marco and Celia. Because I never really developed a close bond with Isobel, nor did I ever really see love between her and Marco, I won’t even say that there’s a love triangle in this, but if you did see it, then I guess it was there.
However, I really just felt this novel centered around Marco and Celia coming into their gifts as two very different magicians and trying to grasp what the competition was about, with very little help from their respective mentors.
When Celia and Marco meet though, gosh, Erin Morgenstern did a remarkable job at showing their instant connection. It was spectacular to witness.
This was also one of those weird novels, that I truly loved every character (aside from Prospero near the end). I even still ended up really liking Mr. A. H. (Alexander). However, the twins - Poppet and Widget and a dreamer in love with the circus, Bailey, really ended up stealing the show away from Celia and Marco near the end, and I ended up really enjoying reading their story and how it all ended up intertwining.
All in all, this was just a wonderful novel to me, and one that I plan on picking up so that I can have my own copy to re-read, and re-read, and re-read for years to come. Just perfection, to me.