Book Review: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus arrives without any advance warning.  It just appears on the outskirts of a town and draws people to it.  The all black-and-white circus amazes people with its fantastical elements, and it is an experience that stays with its attendees forever.  Little do the common people know that there is an ongoing competition within the circus.  Two young people have been selected to compete against one another in a battle of skill and imagination.  Despite their destiny to be opponents, Celia and Marco fall in love and must contend with the consequences of their choices.

Morgenstern’s novel garnered a fair amount of publicity and critical acclaim when it was published last year.  Topping many of the best of lists for 2011, the book also managed to make a number of lists of adult fiction recommended for young adults.  Rich description, lush writing, and an absolutely creative premise make this book a standout. It’s already been optioned for a film, and its cinematic story will translate beautifully to the screen.

Unfortunately, I didn’t love it as much as I wanted to. A lack of character development for the book’s two leads combined with pacing problems and a surplus of secondary and tertiary characters made this book an uneven read at best.  However, the book’s undeniably beautiful prose and moving conclusion helped make up for some of the issues with the story.

Part of the problem present here is that despite the fact that the two main characters are supposed to be in competition with one another, there’s never any sense of true tension.  At one point, Celia remarks about the fact that the game feels more like a “dual exhibition,” and she’s never proven wrong.  Even though there’s some loss of life, both Marco and Celia never seem to be in any real peril.  They also remain fairly static throughout the course of the novel, and since the book spans much of their lives, this feels oddly inauthentic.

The fact that there are so many characters who populate this novel is also problematic.  The chapters jump around in time and focus on a wide variety of people.  While this is a neat narrative trick, it’s only partially successful, because some of the characters are much more interesting than the others (I could have done with way more of the twins and way less of pretty much everyone else).  It’s hard to keep everyone straight, and at a certain point, you start to wonder why you should have to, anyway.

Some readers won’t mind the issues I found in this book.  It’s got a sort of magical realism to its story that makes it intriguing in a very unique way.  The descriptions will be enough to keep some readers satisfied, and others will revel in the love story between the two magicians (though I kept feeling like something was missing).  Despite my issues with the book, I can see this one’s appeal, absolutely.  I’ll definitely be seeing the movie.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. Doubleday: 2011. Borrowed copy.

(#73) Book Review: The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab

In the town of Near, children have always heard the stories about the Near Witch who one lived there.  Lexi grew up hearing the tale, and she often entertains her little sister Wren with the same story.  It has always just been a fairy tale.  But when a strange boy appears in the town and then local children start to go missing from their beds, the villagers start to get suspicious.  As the search for the culprit intensifies, Lexi races to find answers to her own questions: about the story of the witch and about the mysterious boy she calls Cole.

With The Near Witch, Victoria Schwab has crafted a twisty fairy tale about a small town panicked over the loss of its children and in denial about the power of a woman who once lived there.  Slow to start, Schwab takes her her time building the tension and the action, allowing the story to reach a climax that will leave many readers on the edge of their seat.  Strong characterization and an accessible voice in narrator Lexi make this debut worth reading.

Schwab is a good writer, and her stylistically strong writing creates a clear and somewhat eerie picture of the town of Near.  What is interesting to note about Schwab’s story is the narration itself: Lexi’s voice is fairly contemporary, and yet the story seems to be set in some undefined part of the past.  There is no technology, and Lexi spends time cutting wood and helping care for her little sister Wren, but there is still something modern about her voice.  It is intriguing but not distracting, which is a delicate balance to manage.

For the most part, Schwab creates strong characters.  Lexi is by far the strongest in her characterization: smart and driven but stuck in her town and by her circumstances.  Wren, her little sister, is also well-drawn, containing the voice of a young child who in many ways idolizes her older sister.  Lexi’s mother and her uncle play minor roles, but both are given consideration and are treated with care.  It is only Cole, the mysterious newcomer to Near and love interest for Lexi, whose characterization I found lacking.

This book is both a fairy tale itself as well as a tribute to the tales it draws inspiration from.  Although there is a love story present here, it is a quiet one, and the novel’s main focus is one of horror.  Schwab successfully plays with that mood.  As more children begin to disappear, the tension the villagers of Near feel is palpable.  Creating that sort of tension, as well as sustaining it, is a rare skill, and Schwab does it well.

The Near Witch hits book shelves TODAY.

The Near Witch by Victoria Schwab.  Disney-Hyperion: 2011.  Electronic galley accepted for review via Netgalley.

(#71) Book Review: Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma

For Chloe, it has always been her sister Ruby: Ruby, whose mere presence seems to make people want to please her however they can.  Whatever Ruby says is law.  When Ruby tells Chloe to swim across the reservoir, Ruby does it.  But when she discovers the body of a classmate, Ruby and Chloe are separated.  Two years later, Ruby reappears in Chloe’s life and convinces her to come back.  Things are not as Chloe left them, though, and as she gets closer to the truth of what Ruby has done, she realizes that her bond with her sister might not ever be the same.

There’s an inherent problem in trying to review Nova Ren Suma’s beautiful, haunting book about the bond between two sisters: it’s so good and so complicated that I feel overwhelmed before I even begin.  However, because I believe this book to be one of the best published this year as well as an important book in the genre of magical realism, I’ll do my best to review it.  Here goes nothing.

The first thing that should strike readers about Suma’s story is how eerie it is.  From the very first page, Chloe’s narration sets the scene of life in upstate New York, and readers can tell that something is a little off.  This feeling grows slowly as the tension in the story builds.  It’s a gnawing feeling in the pit of one’s stomach, and the uneasiness will be too much for some readers.  This uneasiness is made more pronounced by the realization that Chloe is an extremely unreliable narrator.

Ruby is Chloe’s older sister, and it is clear that Chloe idolizes her.  In her eyes, Ruby can do no wrong.  The fact that Ruby has a sort of power over most people becomes clear early on, but what is interesting is to watch as some of the characters are able to shake her influence every once in a while.  This doesn’t happen to Chloe, who seems unable to differentiate herself from her sister, no matter how detrimental Ruby’s influence over her is.  Suma’s skillful characterization and writing allow the reader to know that Ruby is bad news, that the two girls relationship is completely screwed up without ever having Chloe actually acknowledge it.  So yes, this story is creepy, and yes, readers should be uncomfortable with pretty much everything that occurs.

Much has been made of the magical realism genre, and it is my belief that this book is the epitome of it.  Ruby’s slow-growing power over the town continually breaches the rules of the natural world and of the magical one as well.  As the boundaries continue to expand and the rules change, Chloe (and the reader) has to continually adjust expectations and understanding of what is happening.  Ruby’s power over life and death is both thrilling and unsettling.  She is, in many ways, the ultimate subversion of a manic pixie dream girl: Ruby is what happens when that particular trope goes horribly wrong.  This kind of writing takes serious skill, and it is clear that Suma has it in spades.

Suma’s writing is lyrical, hypnotic, and repetitive.  The pacing of the plot is slow–and it is intentional.  Everything about the story and Chloe’s narration is meant to create a surreal feeling.  The world in which Ruby creates for Chloe isn’t quite right.  The distortion that Chloe feels and sees upon her return to town is much like looking at an object under water: you can see it and identify it, but it’s a little wavy or stretched or the wrong color. I feel like I got a little lost in my simile there.

The problem with Suma’s novel is that it’s so complex and layered that some readers will find themselves frustrated by it.  I’ve seen more than a few reviews where it’s clear that readers completely missed the point about the relationship between Ruby and Chloe, where they completely missed the fact that the novel is supposed to be weird.  It’s okay that the book didn’t work for them.  This is probably not a book for the extremely literal-minded crowd.  But for those who love rich, controlled language and a fantastically understated horror story?  This book is for them.

Highly recommended.

Imaginary Girls by Nova Ren Suma.  Dutton Juvenile: 2011.  Library copy.

(#22) Book Review: Wish by Alexandra Bullen

Olivia Larsen’s family has been torn apart by the death of her twin sister, Violet.  When her mom uproots them from Massachusetts and moves them to a crumbly old house in San Francisco, Olivia can barely bring herself to care, because nothing can make her forget that she’s lost her sister forever.  When she stumbles into a dress shop and meets a mysterious seamstress, her life changes, because the woman gives her a magical dress that will grant her one wish.  When Olivia wishes for her sister, Violet appears.  With two more wishes left, Olivia begins to navigate what it means to truly live and love.

Although Bullen’s modern twist on a fairy-tale-like story has some magical realism in it, it’s really more of a story about two sisters.  The magic takes a back seat to the complicated relationship between Olivia and Violet, and its in these moments between these girls where Bullen does her best work.  She has a strong grasp on family drama, and these scenes are the most realistic and the most easily related to.  The magic in the story is diluted, allowing the relationships between the characters to grow and evolve.

However, the characters never popped for me.  Although Olivia is sweet, and her relationship with her parents real enough, nothing about her ever stood out to me.  The other characters in the story seemed to be much of the same: workaholic mother, emotionally absent father, cute-boy love interest (Soren: great name, dull character).  The one character worth noting is that of popular-girl Calla, whose probable mean-girl trope is subverted early on in the story.  Bullen allows Calla to be a character with flaws and insecurities, and the fact that she and Olivia were able to forge a friendship was refreshing.

A sweet, simple story overall, the writing was as flat as the character.  Bullen sets her story in one of the most magical cities in the United States but does nothing with it, really.  She throws in some notable locations in the story but spends no time using the geography of the city to add to the story or the characters.  The prose was often stilted and bland.  Nothing about it was magical, which is what one hopes for in a story about magic.

Largely forgettable, this book is likely to find most of its fans in the younger teen set.  Older, savvier readers will struggle with the safe characters and the mostly saccharine story.  While not offensive in any way, I also wasn’t wowed in the least.

Wish by Alexandra Bullen, Point (Alloy): 2010.  Purchased on Kindle.