Tag: debut novel

Review: The Night Circus

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The Night Circus
Erin Morgentstern

This was a reread for me, which typically I don’t reread books so soon after the first time I’ve read them. It tends to be a decades later ‘oh yeah, I can appreciate this differently now’ vibe. But I read this book for the first time in 2020 and I’ve probably aged a few decades between them and now.

I remember, both times I’ve read it, immediately thinking of the Hunchback of Notre Dame. The opening lines are from the perspective of and detailing the Night Circus itself, the edifice, and I remember the first time I read it being drawn in by this comparison. It’s something that promises something unusual.

What I find funny, having read this book twice, is that the characters are so crisp and well developed while giving the smallest amount of detail necessary. That’s how a mysterious air is achieved, after all, but it really does smack you in the face to realize how little you know and how much you still attach yourself on.

My opinion of certain aspects has changed given the time and life experiences I’ve had between readings; I am far more sympathetic to Isobel the scorned card reader; far less sympathetic to Tsukiko who betrayed her love.

I still love the man in grey and Chandresh.

The characterization is evocative. The storytelling and pacing; the sense of being out of time in several aspects, is something which manages to draw you in while keeping you separated, exactly as a circus should.

Plus, who doesn’t live a story that comes with an aesthetic?

It’s an absolute recommendation

Review: Remarkably Bright Creatures

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The debut novel from Shelby Van Pelt, I’d seen an article talking about Remarkably Bright Creatures shortly after it was published , talking about the unexpected nature of the book and how it had come together. It was stuck like a burr in the back of my hair, something to look out for.

I had forgotten about it for a bit so when I had the opportunity to read it, it was a surprise. Like finding a missing key.

How appropriate, then, that the whole novel centers around small discoveries and their importance, finding things lost you’d not known were missing.

I found the book a bit slow at times, I had thought. Then I checked my tracking app and found I’d read it in two days. I thought it had been longer, and in part that’s because of how immersive the characterization and set description is.

Carefully crafted and laid, the book is lovingly written with characters that come alive, even those that go from obnoxious to well rounded through the course of the narrative. All of this is punctuated with a Greek chorus of Marcellus, an octopus, describing events as he witnesses them from his tank at the aquarium where many of the human characters lives intersect.

The book is charming, and despite seeming simple at it’s outset it was incredibly sentimental and sweet.