My first read of the year was The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern. This is the same author as The Starless Sea that I read last year, which I really enjoyed so I was looking forward to reading this one.

My Summary

The Night Circus appears and disappears without warning, an ethereal, magical playground that doesn’t conform to normal rules and defies logic. Little do their patrons know that this is the stage for a magical competition between Celia and Marco. A challenge set by their teachers when they were children, binding them to a duel displaying their magical prowess through a series of attractions in The Night Circus, which gradually become love letters to the other. No one could have predicted how being bound to one another would affect them, nor how deeply they would fall for one another, despite the game in which neither of them know the rules that are stuck in until the unknown end finally comes.

My review

Ummm, so this another beautiful story, with lots of dark academia and magical vibes but this book really didn’t draw me in. Having read Starless Sea first which really captured my imagination, I found this book hard to really get into. Just like Starless Sea, the timeline hops around in a kind of seemingly plotless but yet cleverly intertwined tangle. I know some people really enjoy these kind of meandering timelines but it’s just not for me, it leaves me feeling the whole time like I’m grasping for a conclusion it’s leading me towards that’s just out of reach and although this does have an ending that ties everything together, it still fell a bit flat for me.

So, in conclusion, it was an enjoyable enough read but I don’t necessarily think it deserves the hype that TikTok was giving it at one point.