Well. I’m glad it’s not just me. I had a stroke two years ago and some of my, I guess you could say, tastes? Or proclivities? Are “off.” For example, I now hate the taste and texture of sushi. I used to LOVE sushi. I accept that certain things are different now than they were before the stroke (over and above losing the use of my right arm and walking with a cane). But I was pretty sure I was perceiving The Night Circus correctly.
WTF is up with this book? I’ve read many many books of all sorts, and I cannot name one where I didn’t know what was going on yet at 90 pages in. That’s when we meet the dude that hosts the Midnight Dinners and his friends, and they start working on plans for his proposed Night Circus.
Which I would have thought would happen sooner but okay. I mean it was like 30 or 40 pages ago when the tents were up and the kid snuck inside and met the girl who gave him one of her gloves as proof that he’d snuck in. And the novel opens with a rather detailed description of the entryway. So those things happened in the future, AFTER the Midnight Dinners. Fine.
Mostly my issue with The Night Circus is that even now, at 90 pages in, the author is still introducing characters! And with no hint of how they fit into the story? In the beginning there are two magicians. We don't learn what mysterious "something" gives them their magic power. I get that the kids were young apprentices, if you will, learning magic in two very different ways from the two magicians. Then in later chapters we learn how that’s going. They're destined for some sinister sounding contest involving magic, that's been established at this point. But we don't know why there needs to be a contest. And who are all these other people? The Midnight Dinners guy? The kid that sneaks into the circus? Isobel? And what's the circus exactly? It seems like some sort of story would gel by now, I dunno. That's how I was taught to write. But I don't have a New York Times best seller and multiple award winning novel like The Night Circus. I just have this blog.
After reading all the posts on Reddit (that's not even the only post discussing the topic), Goodreads, and even Facebook (which I got off like a month ago), I have learned that there’s a slow slog of a romance ahead for the magic kids. That was to be expected. Something sad with Isobel. I suppose she gets her heart broken. I can only surmise that we finally get to the circus. And the magic contest. Which our two magicians don't even know about at this juncture. And we the reader don't know the reason for, not that we know much of anything?
I don’t even know if I want to finish The Night Circus. What do you guys think, should I persevere? Is there any joy in it? Does it get better at all? I'm sooooo booooored...🕮
