Has anyone read it? I picked it up on a whim and finished it in two days. It’s by Erin Morgenstern, written in 2010. Maybe I’m late to the party (again), but I couldn’t put it down.
Read it and loved it! Could only set it down with the utmost reluctance and pined until I could read again. Morganstern created somewhere I truly want to visit… and despite the utter fantasia of it all, I swear I could smell the smells and see the black-and-white striped tents. Ohhhhhhhhh!
I’m reading it now. I read that it started as a National Novel Writing Month novel, which piqued my interest. I’m reading horrendously slowly right now, but I like it so far.
I loved it! I’m still not entirely sure *why *I loved it, but I did. It was one of those books where I read the first 3/4 in less than a day, and then took as long as possible for the final 1/4 so it wouldn’t end…
It’s adequate, basically Angela Carter with trainer wheels; fantasy lite for the “vampires are sooooo last year” crowd. Competently written but far too florid in places, and the plot relies too much on its two protagonists - who are pretty much ciphers - being both hopelessly dim and ridiculously malleable. It’ll probably sell billions.
I could put it down. I got about 150 pages into it in 3 weeks…
I bought it, blind, on Sunday afternoon and finished it Monday night, well, actually Tuesday morning.
I didn’t get anything done for two days.
I couldn’t get through it. It was what I think of as a “cozy” book, meaning I enjoyed the pretty and pleasant little world built up within, but then nothing ever seemed to happen. Little irritations started to build and soon I ceased to care, and then it went back to the library. Maybe if it hadn’t been an audio book I could have skimmed along.
This was my exact reaction. I did finish it, but it was a slog. I really enjoyed the circus world she built, but the characters were bland and uninteresting - at the end, I really didn’t give a crap what happened to any of them. I wish she could have figured out something better to do with her intricate environment.
I absolutely agree with both of these…which is why I can’t figure out why I loved it so much!
The ending was dreadful: because Marco and Whatherface didn’t have the balls or the gumption to tell their mentors to go eat a bag of dicks with their stupid challenge,
they get to be imprisoned as circus ghosties forever and ever
and everyone else in the circus, supposedly their friends,
is equally trapped there for all eternity, dragged from place to place to endlesly perform for a bunch of gawkers night after night.
That’s a fucking horror story ending, not a grand romantic apotheosis. And meanwhile their sponsors are free to start their dick-waving contest all over again with another pair of chumps…