The Night Circus by Erin MorgensternDoubleday (Random House), 2011

New York, 1873: We meet a man who performs as Prospero the Enchanter; he meets his five-year-old daughter, Celia.

London, 1874: Prospero the Enchanter performs: the theater is crowded and hot, the women in the audience fan themselves. Another night, another illusionist. Except not exactly, because Prospero’s magic is real: “At one point in the evening, each of those fans suddenly becomes a small bird, until flocks of them loop the theater to uproarious applause. When each bird returns, falling into neatly folded fans on their respective owners’ laps, the applause only grows, though some are too stunned to clap, turning fans of feathers and lace over in their hands in wonder, no longer at all concerned about the heat” (12).

London, 1886: Le Cirque des Rêves opens. Celia, it turns out, has inherited her father’s abilities; he teaches her to control her magic and the world around her, and she performs as an “illusionist” as he did. Except she is not just performing: she’s competing, in a challenge or a game her father has organized, a challenge whose rules she’s never entirely been told, against an opponent whose identity she doesn’t know.

The Night Circus jumps in place and time: we see London and New York and bits of other places (Munich, Prague) in the mid/late 1880s; we see Concord, Massachusetts in 1897, in 1902. Mostly, we see the circus, which is well worth seeing. It’s a circus built by magic, open only at night. It’s the venue for the challenge between Celia and her opponent, Marco, but it’s also a marvel, an entertainment, a spectacle. Instead of being a single tent, it’s a multitude of tents connected by narrow, winding paths. There are acrobats and fire-eaters and a fortune-teller and a contortionist, but there are more novel attractions as well. Thinking the challenge is a show of skill, Celia and Marco keep building new magical wonders (though Marco doesn’t travel with the circus—he controls his portions of it from afar). There’s a tent that contains a garden made entirely of ice; there’s a vertical maze that sounds like the best jungle gym ever; there’s a Wishing Tree and a Pool of Tears, and all of it’s lushly described, from the sights to the smells and tastes (caramel apples, hot cocoa, cider).

There is so much description that the book is sometimes slow going, but I still found it enjoyable, and when it picks up, toward the end, it really picks up: there’s love, in addition to magic, as Celia and Marco end up totally smitten, and I was definitely a sucker for that particular plot thread. I watched a video interview with Erin Morgenstern in which she said that this book is “a story about love and choice and the shades of grey between the black and white,” and I think that’s apt, and a big part of why I found it so appealing.