I must say that my hopes were high for this book. It was highly recommended all over the web and even spent some time on the New York Times Bestseller List. Unfortunately, this one fell short for me and for the rest of the group as well.
When "the game" was introduced and the children were bound into a magical competition with each other, I thought the plot would lead to some sort of showdown of magical talent. Instead, "the game" wasn't a game at all and it just. dragged. on. - spanning some 30 years before reaching a stalemate. Talk about anticlimactic. And, the love element was so watered down! I mean - Yawn. I found myself more intrigued by Bailey's crush on Poppet than on the primary "love story" between Celia and Marco.
And, as I mentioned in my prior post, the jumping around between time and space made this very difficult to follow. But, I have a theory that the author did this on purpose. I do not believe it is coincidence that she chose a clockmaker to be her person on the outside, nor do I believe she so elaborately described the clock used in the circus because she likes clocks. Sure, she may have been making some general statement about time in relationship to the circus, like time passes differently inside the circus or something to do with the sustainability of illusion or the circus itself. But more than that, I believe she was sending the reader a message. Given the amount of exquisite detail in her descriptions of the magic contained within the circus, her background in theater, and the clock with all its moving parts that breaks and reforms like a puzzle, I suspect the author wanted somebody to deconstruct the chaos of her novel and re-work it into a linear screenplay. She clearly wrote some scenes with visions of Tim Burton and Johnny Depp dancing in her head. Well, I believe she got her wish. The Night Circus, the movie, is apparently in development. Overall, I felt this book was more like a painting than a story. It was beautiful to look at, but lacked the richness and depth I was wanting.
