too much grandeur, too little heart
There's so much to like in Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus. It's an incredibly visual book, lush and atmospheric. The circus is written with loving detail, from the wondrous giant clock to the dream-like performers. I think I would've loved this book if it weren't for the awful "love story".
To summarize, The Night Circus is about two magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete and kill each other in a chess-like magic duel. Their stage is the titular night circus (its name is Cirque les Reves or something), and everyone and everything in it are their tools to outwit and outmatch each other. Of course they fall in love.
I wish I could sound less cynical about this. The prospect of two brilliant young people from opposing sides in a warzone falling in love appeals to me because there's so much room for unlikely friendship, intimacy, and character development. What I got instead was lots of wangst (gorgeously written wangst, I admit) and a pair of shallowly written characters shoehorned into some semblance of a romance because Ms. Morgenstern says so. He becomes obsessed with her because of some display of magic but has never really gotten to know her. A decade later, she falls for him the moment she discovers he's her opponent, despite never paying attention to him at all previously. The supporting characters are much more sympathetic, so it kills me that these characters are merely tools for Celia and Marco to be together. I couldn't decipher Celia's personality at all except that she's elegantly flashy, while Marco uses people to get what he wants and then completely disregards them once he falls in love with her.
There's the requisite agonized declaration of love where she calls him out on leading his girlfriend - he has a girlfriend he's been neglecting for ages - on and he's like "I never loved her! Please believe me!" and instead of pursuing that line of thought, she just weeps at the tragedy that one of them must die to end the (decades-long) duel. Good God, that moment completely killed any sympathy I had left for them.
Ms. Morgenstern sacrificed characterization for atmosphere, and I think this is a mistake. While I loved that this book made me feel like I'm actually in the circus, I hated the romance. The Night Circus is (touted as) a love story, but how can it be so when said love story has so little to support the "love"?
To summarize, The Night Circus is about two magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood to compete and kill each other in a chess-like magic duel. Their stage is the titular night circus (its name is Cirque les Reves or something), and everyone and everything in it are their tools to outwit and outmatch each other. Of course they fall in love.
I wish I could sound less cynical about this. The prospect of two brilliant young people from opposing sides in a warzone falling in love appeals to me because there's so much room for unlikely friendship, intimacy, and character development. What I got instead was lots of wangst (gorgeously written wangst, I admit) and a pair of shallowly written characters shoehorned into some semblance of a romance because Ms. Morgenstern says so. He becomes obsessed with her because of some display of magic but has never really gotten to know her. A decade later, she falls for him the moment she discovers he's her opponent, despite never paying attention to him at all previously. The supporting characters are much more sympathetic, so it kills me that these characters are merely tools for Celia and Marco to be together. I couldn't decipher Celia's personality at all except that she's elegantly flashy, while Marco uses people to get what he wants and then completely disregards them once he falls in love with her.
There's the requisite agonized declaration of love where she calls him out on leading his girlfriend - he has a girlfriend he's been neglecting for ages - on and he's like "I never loved her! Please believe me!" and instead of pursuing that line of thought, she just weeps at the tragedy that one of them must die to end the (decades-long) duel. Good God, that moment completely killed any sympathy I had left for them.
Ms. Morgenstern sacrificed characterization for atmosphere, and I think this is a mistake. While I loved that this book made me feel like I'm actually in the circus, I hated the romance. The Night Circus is (touted as) a love story, but how can it be so when said love story has so little to support the "love"?