Do you dig magic? Do you dig love? In a circus setting? If yes, look no further. Grab a copy of The Night Circus and start reading. Like now. You won’t find anything quite like this one. You see, I have joined millions others to Take Earth Back, writing my own galactic story based on my decisions and actions. To be able to distract me away from the highly anticipated video game Mass Effect 3, this book has got to be good. Real good.
Well, it is.
I will not go beyond telling you what the excerpt says. Because I want it to be a magical read to you, as it was to me. In 1886, a mysterious traveling circus pops out from nowhere. Tangled within this circus are two young magicians locked in a competition. Celia is the enchanter’s daughter and Marco is the sorcerer’s apprentice. Where does the circus come from? What is the competition about? What is at stake? Where does magic come from? What does magic do? In retrospect, the answers hardly matter. Because there is so much details on the journey itself, one could easily lose oneself devouring every single image, every little scent. Every tent in the circus, every magical moment, the author turns words into something so surreal that you feel as though you are inside those tents, experiencing the shows in a time before you were born.
Majority of the materials are narrated in present tense. Each snippet starts with a date and a location. And the snippets are not arranged in a chronological order. The time dimension plays a part in the story telling. It may seem messy and disorienting initially. But it works amazingly well going back and forth in time, juxtaposing the snippets and bringing out the essence of cause and effect. Underlying to the story is a simple message: everything in life has its time and place. If I am to read this book again, I would make a catalog of time and location of each chapter. I would then attempt to read the story in a chronological order and see how a different experience it would be, reading the story from a different perspective so as to speak.
A small part of the book is written is second person, ‘you’. It is unusual and rare. It works well. If you love magic like I do, chances are, you will be drawn into the story, materializing the circus inside the boundary of your imagination. When that happens, you know the author has done something remarkable. The Night Circus will capture your imagination. Be fascinated. Go ahead and try it out today.