Goodreads Summary

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway—a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them, this is a game in which only one can be left standing, and the circus is but the stage for a remarkable battle of imagination and will. Despite themselves, however, Celia and Marco tumble headfirst into love—a deep, magical love that makes the lights flicker and the room grow warm whenever they so much as brush hands.

True love or not, the game must play out, and the fates of everyone involved, from the cast of extraordinary circus performers to the patrons, hang in the balance, suspended as precariously as the daring acrobats overhead.

Written in rich, seductive prose, this spell-casting novel is a feast for the senses and the heart.

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Rating: 3.5/5

I read this book thinking it was going to be my new all-time favourite novel because of the amount of praise I saw online prior to reading it. And yes, I live under a rock because I found out about it almost ten years after its publication.

Short review

Pros: vivid descriptions, diversity of characters and how well they work together, atmospheric, easy read

Cons: lack of a storyline, characters work together but not enough to stand alone, starts dragging 2/3 into the story, chronological mess, description isn’t true to the actual book

Long review

This book has some great aspects which is why I would rate it higher than average. For one, it is a very atmospheric novel set in the Victorian period, that too within a circus. And Morgensten does not hold back in her descriptions. Whether it’s the opulent parties thrown by the circus director, their exotic foods, the varieties of circus tents, or something as simple as a rainy night, she nails the imagery. But flowery wording doesn’t compensate for a lack of substance in the actual plotline.

The whole premise of the book (and the circus) is that two magicians (Celia and Marco) are supposedly in a “fierce duel” but Celia doesn’t even know Marco is her opponent until we’re midway through the book! And this “fierce” duel is more so a competition to produce the most dazzling product of magic using the circus as a venue where Celia and Marco are actually acting as proxies for their insane and sociopathic father figures who are actually the true competitors. On top of that, it was extremely difficult for me to feel any sort of sympathy for Celia and Marco’s “love story” because they don’t interact until halfway through the book and even then there’s no real interaction between the two and suddenly they’re both in love with each other. I didn’t find myself rooting for their love story at all—it was too rushed and there wasn’t any development. However, I will say Morgensten has a way with words because the moments before any physical contact the two made were filled with so much sexual tension and passion that I was itching for it to happen even though I didn’t necessarily “ship” the two.

The other characters in the story were a big part of why I rated this book as high as I did. There was such diversity in characters and the roles they played in the circus. These characters work so well together that when one of them dies, just as their absence affects the maintenance of the circus, it also affects the reader because something just feels….amiss. It feels wrong that certain characters won’t be a part of the midnight parties thrown by Chandresh the brilliant visionary of the Cirque because they’re all supposed to be there together. The one person that never really fit into the story for me was Bailey. He was introduced so suddenly and despite not having any connection to the original concoctors of Le Cirque des Rêves, he becomes integral to its sustenance at the end of the novel.

Similar to how Bailey was kind of just thrown into the novel and the reader is supposed to go along with it, so is the timeline of the story. It’s not a chronological storyline and we jump around from the future to the past to the present and from character to character. I’m not a fan of that style because it inhibits my reading experience since I have to piece together information in my head since it follows a non-linear pattern. Despite that, the book was very easy to read and intriguing enough to keep you interested…until it started dragging on near the end of the book. It turned from a story about a circus with magical aspects that you can’t really explain to a story about a magic circus.

People have very strong opinions about this book, claiming it remained with them long after finishing it. The atmospheric aspect also stuck with me while I was in the early and middle stages of the book and waiting for explanations to the questions I had. But when I didn’t get my answers until the very end of the novel, that effect was long gone. Overall, it was a good book with brilliant imagery but lacking in a strong climax and ending. It makes me skeptical about reading The Starless Sea because there were more mixed reviews about that novel so there’s a good chance I won’t like it if I wasn’t overly impressed with this despite all the raving reviews.