Week 7 - Night Circus

The Night Circus

I  really enjoyed reading Erin Morgenstern's Night Circus this week. I thought it handled magic in fantasy in a really interesting way that wouldn't have worked for a lot of other authors, because the magic doesn't have many hard rules, but the characters use it a lot and it plays a very important role in the story. This could have easily made the book feel a little too floaty and like the author was using magic as a solution or reason for whatever they wanted, but I thought Morgenstern pulled it off because of how character-driven the book was despite the heavy use of magic--magic just functioned as a way they expressed themselves, like art. The only magic-related part of the book that I'm still not sure if I liked, though, was the destiny/foretelling aspect of it. It was interesting how everything pulled together around Bailey at the end, but I thought that Baily's role in the resolution of the book was disproportionate to his role in the book as a whole. I think he didn't necessarily need more screen time, but a more significant emerging story in the world ahead of the final few chapters would have helped for me.