30.
Title: The Night Circus
Author: Erin Morgenstern
Pages: 400 pages
Genre: Fiction
Medium: Kindle
Acquisition: Library Book
Date Completed: March 24, 2012
Rating: ***



More than a book about a circus, Morgenstern's The Night Circus is a narrative about questions, knowledge of self, and the role of external factors - including, for example, entertainment - in the shaping of the self. Character growth is what is most appealing about this story.

But book hype is a fickle beast, and can do just as much damage to a readership as it can propel an author towards stardom. The Night Circus is one of these books that, for my own reading, was not helped by the raving reviews I have been hearing from trusted reader friends, and I can't help but wonder if I would have rated the book higher had I not heard such illustrious praise for the book before reading it myself.

I, for one, did not find the first part of the story compelling, and was not captivated by the tale until 22% (thanks, Kindle) of the way into the text. At that point I was indeed hooked, and was fairly greedy in my reading. While I continued to loathe the occasional shifts to second-person narration (what seemed to me to be a cheap authorial trick rather than a successful narrative device), I was able to quickly gloss over such meaningless moments to get back to the true meat of the story. However, like the beginning, I found that the conclusion of the novel was dull and unnecessary, and could easily identify the point at which the novel could have concluded more successfully. I found the end to be too traditional for what is supposed to be such an nontraditional space, and was rather disappointed.

While I enjoyed the book much more than I initially thought, I am equally glad that I was able to borrow the novel from the library.