As a young child, Celia Bowen meets a world-famous magician who she is told is her father. He teaches her the art of true magic and trains her to compete in a highly dangerous game against Marco, the son of her father’s nemesis. The battle ground consists simply of an elaborate circus, which shows up without warning at night and offers the most magical evening that one could experience. But both Celia and Marco are unaware of the game’s rules and that they are each other’s opponent until they have fallen in love. As the two grow closer, the game’s dark rules remind them of their situation, and fate does not change for true love.
Let’s not beat around the bush. The Night Circus was awful. I even think that Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was better than this. There are so many issues with this novel and I don’t know how to even address them. First, absolutely nothing is resolved at the end of the book. Marco’s father is still some mystery man, Celia is still unsure of why she and Marco are in a competition in the first place, and the novel doesn’t even explicitly state why Celia and Marco’s fathers were rivals. The second thing that angered me the most was probably the “relationship” between Celia and Marco. To preface, there wasn’t any! It seemed that upon their second meeting, they suddenly decided too just like each other. The romance wasn’t gradual at all, and just seemed to remember that it had a role to play in the third half of the book. Celia had no personality besides being an illusionist who could change the color of her hair, and Marco was some manipulative liar who literally erased people’s memories if they didn’t give him what he wanted. Another small thing that annoys me the most is that the synopsis of the book states that their love caused the lights to flicker and that happened only ONCE throughout the whole novel!!! What was the point of all this mention of deep, passionate love when it doesn’t even exist in the story? Lastly, the competition between Celia and Marco was just stupid. The final battle (if you can even call it that) consisted of Celia doing spells at the circus and Marco being in London. They weren’t even in the same area?! The novel discusses that the competition was high stakes, but the circus was mentioned more than Celia and Marco’s supposed rivalry. Overall, this book was definitely not for me, and I would not recommend it.