The Night Circus - Erin Morgenstern

Goodreads rating: 4*

I fell in love with the idea of this story as soon as I read the blurb and for the most part, it lived up to my expectations. The concept and the amount of imagination that went into this book was incredible and I've certainly not come across anything similar before.

I'm not a big fan of slow-paced books, but I appreciate that in order to get the imagery right for this particular novel, it was important for the descriptions to be quite lengthy in places to enable the reader to really build the image up in their mind. This book was definitely more geared towards the circus itself than character development, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing and the author made such a massive deal out of the colour scheme, that I almost felt like I was reading the written version of an old black and white film (if that makes any sense).

The main downside to this book for me, was how much the timelines and viewpoints jumped around from chapter to chapter - I understood the idea, but it jumped backwards and forwards so much that at times, I felt like I was getting whiplash and it was hard to follow the story. I also felt that it was a little drawn out - there was a lot of time spent setting the scene, building up to the main event and then everything seemed to happen so fast at the end.

I would have loved to have had more detail around Celia and Marco's love story, but maybe that's just the romantic in me. I'd still definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a fairly easy-going fantasy read - it gets slightly dark in places, but nothing overtly sinister and overall, I really loved the originality.