Dispatch from the Field: Joe Admits To Crying In Joy While Reading This Book

"Honestly, I haven't read a book in a while that made me cry out in joy at the end of the book. And The Night Circus made me cry out not once, but twice. I was so taken by this novel of magic, and a circus at the turn of the century, that I want all my friends to read it, and to relive it in their reading of it, and in our discussions of it...

Erin Morgenstern's debut novel is a riveting tale about an exotic circus in which the patrons do not realize the magic is real. The story takes place around the turn of the last century, all over the world. Morgenstern does an excellent job of balancing the story between characters, as she alternates the focus of the story on a variety of characters. I thought the characters were fully realized and endlessly fascinating. The novel revolves around two main characters, Marco and Celia. Both were bound to a mysterious magical competition. There are few rules for their competition, or at least that they two of them know, and two of them discover as they fall in love that only one of them can survive their battle. As they become more and more enmeshed in the duel between their competition and their love, things around them begin to fall apart. Can they keep the circus going? The book never lets up on its initial momentum. If anything, the pages turned far quicker as the book went on. Although there are other books out there about magic in the real world, this book stands on its own next to Harry Potter and Lev Grossman's The Magicians."

--Joe