BOOK REVIEW | The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

"The circus arrives without warning..."

It is a place of dreams, all in black and white, with spots of red on certain customers.  In this circus, you can watch a trapeze act that defies gravity, enter into a tent of stories, witness kittens jump through hoops, make wishes on wells, have your fortune read and more.  It is opened from sunset to sunrise and only stays a few weeks before packing and changing location.  Maybe it will come back to your town, but maybe it won't.

The Night Circus is a beautiful book about a whole cast of characters.  We have Celia, the magical protege; Marco, the studious student; Tsukiko, the contortionist; Bailey, the dreamer; Herr, the clockmaker; Poppet and Widget, the eccentric twins; Chandresh, the master; Tara, the one who saw too much; and many more.  They all work in a magical circus doing various activities, from performing to creating tents to handing out food.

What makes this circus so magical is that inside, unbeknownst to anyone except for the players, lies a game.  The rules are vague, the boundaries are flimsy and not even the participants really understand what's going on.

"I have never fully grasped the rules of the game, so I am following my instincts instead."

I would say how the game works is exactly how this book was written.  The language Morgenstern uses is beautiful and poetic, but very often it was hard to imagine exactly what she meant because she constantly keeps her reader in mystery.  This is done on purpose to create an atmosphere that could perfectly mimic the circus.  Although I loved how atmospheric this book was, sometimes not understanding the game and the temporal displacement of the novel were a bit too much.  There desperation of the characters was never properly conveyed to the reader, but we were told often of how one of the players was exhausted/on the brink of a meltdown, etc.  I never saw these meltdowns or complaints.  I never felt them.

As the game progresses and more and more lives are at stake, I could never really feel how on edge everything was.  There were very few moments when the circus would have a ripple that would cause something drastic, and when these drastic things happened I felt the panic in the moment, but never the build up.  Because the rules and stakes of the game were so vague, it was hard to feel any crescendo towards a climax.

The novel is full of beautiful imagery that gives a new name to originality:

"When she opens her eyes, they are standing on the quarterdeck of a ship in the middle of the ocean.  Only the ship is made of books, its sails thousands of overlapping pages, and the sea it floats upon is dark black ink."

"Inside, the train is opulent, gilded, and warm.  Most of the passenger cars are lined with thick patterned carpets, upholstered in velvets in burgundies and violets and creams, as though they have been dipped in a sunset, hovering at twilight and holding on to the colors before they fade to midnight and stars."

 In a way, a lot of the creativity of this story reminded me of The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making.  Beautiful images, exciting prospects, interesting concepts.  The writing is what really propelled the book from being a nice read to being an amazing one.

Overall, I would recommend this book for fans of beautiful writing, for fans of experimental writing and for those that like fairy tales.  If you're the kind of reader who needs proper foreshadowing and likes to have concepts and situations thoroughly explained to them, this might not be a book for you.  For me, however, this book was beautiful and possibly the type of book you could read and re-read, finding more and more hidden secrets within.

BOOK REVIEW | Rumble by Ellen Hopkins

1 controlling star.

RUMBLE, by Ellen Hopkins, tells about the life of 18-year-old Matt, who has been on edge ever since his younger brother Luke committed suicide. Since then, his life has gone to shambles. He's lost his brother, his best friends, his parent's marriage is falling apart and his own relationship with his girlfriend is being tested to an uncomfortable point. Acting out in anger is one of the only ways that Matt can cope with all of these issues and he begins a steady cycle into self-destruction.

I admire what Ms. Hopkins tried to do in this novel. She tried to showcase the after-effects of suicide, the importance of forgiveness, and the destruction of relationships all within 500 or so pages. There is a strong chance she could have done this successfully as well if she hadn’t warped, perhaps, the main point of her novel: Control.

Matt is suffocating himself with his desire to control. He wants to control his parent’s marriage, he wants to control his girlfriend, he wants to control his environment (“I need order. I’m used to order”). And who can blame him? He has lost his brother, which was out of his control, his parents are at each other’s throats, something else that is also out of his control, and his own relationship is slowly, but surely, disassembling itself. With all of this pressure, it’s no surprise that the only way he feels like he can regain his life is to enforce every bit of dictatorship he can muster.

There were many passages referring to his girlfriend, Hayden, that reek of Matt’s desire to not only control her, but to literally possess her:

“Hayden turns, waves and her smile is all for me. I think. She gives Jocelyn a quick hug and as she starts away the guy touches her arm, redirecting her attention toward his goodbye. I definitely want to kick his spindly ass.” (Jealousy over innocent gestures by other men.)

“Any guy with a libido and half a brain would want to possess her…” (Trying to justify his powerful feeling of possession over her.)

“Arm still firmly wrapped around Hayden’s waist…”(He is even controlling in his body language.)

“The way she believes every word. The control that gives him.” (This basically spells it out for the reader.)

Perhaps the most frightening of all:

“Having no one to rape and nothing to pillage but myself, I step into the hot water stream, lather up with Mom’s fancy rosemary bath gel, and when I close my eyes, it is Hayden I imagine ramming into, take extreme pleasure in her pain.” (Rape is one of the ultimate forms of control.)

Hayden can feel this control, jealousy and possessiveness in him. It, quite rightly, scares her.

“But sometimes I worry if I tell you what’s on my mind, you’ll freak.”
“Sometimes you scare me.”

All of this control, all of this jealousy, finally culminates into a stand off where Matt physically forces his possession onto Hayden,

“Our hands unlace and I think our lives have, too, and I just can’t let that happen. I maneuver her back against the building, place one hand on each side of her face and repeat, ‘What are you saying?’” (Here he has quite literally trapped her in place, as he's been trying to metaphorically trap her into their relationship the entire time.)

As the book goes on, Matt learns to relinquish some of that control. This comes in the form of forgiveness. All of this time he has been playing the blame game when it came to his brother’s suicide. He blamed his father, his mother, his friend’s, his girlfriend, her friends, himself and, most importantly, a book that is based on interpretation. These grudges he has been holding (which are also a form of control) one by one slip lose and he steps back into the light of forgiveness.

“I blamed the Bible, when its words were not at fault, only the way they’re interpreted by those too willing to wield them like chain saws, cutting other off at the knees.”

However, the rest of the control remains, especially when it comes to his relationships with women, and it is covered up and sugared over, which is where this book lost its merit. Matt never realizes he has a control problems in terms of intimacy. Yes, he acknowledges his OCD-like issues with cleanliness, but there is so much more under the surface that he needs to deal with, and never does. Instead of working on his problems, he finds a girl who will perfectly suit his needs for possession, a girl who is desperate enough to be whatever he wants her to be, unlike Hayden.

“’They say puppies are good for mending broken hearts,’ she joked once. ‘Woof, woof. You can pet me if you want.’” (Willing to change herself for his benefit.)

“She winks. ‘Anything I can do to entertain you, my dear.’” (Willing to demean herself for his benefit.)

The worst part of this is that the author never mentions it. She leaves her character blind to this particular short coming and expects the reader to forget his earlier problems with control and Hayden. I don’t think the author was blind to his controlling personality. Why else mention the fact that he has OCD tendencies? Why else mention how he wants to literally possess Hayden and spend every waking moment with her? My issue is that she did not even attempt to resolve it.

Perhaps the worst part of this is that by the end, after Matt has forgiven himself and those who bullied his brother, he thinks: “Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all this, it’s to have faith in love.” He mentions his parent’s loss of love and how his father had found it in someone else, and how Matt found a new, and supposedly better, love with Alexa. I cannot believe that his innate issue with possession gets thrown to the side to try and make this novel about him not trusting love.

This was never about love. This was never about forgiveness. This was never about faith. This book was about a young man who needs to learn how to live his life without having to control every aspect of it, and that was not given the proper attention. Matt should have been in counseling for his control problems, not his problem with forgiveness,because his problems with forgiveness will go away as he learns to let go of wanting to be in charge of everything. He should have never entered into another relationship without even fixing what went wrong in the first.

This novel had the opportunity to convey a strong message but, in my opinion, never reach its goal

August Wrap Up + September TBR

August turned out to be a decent month for reading.  I read a lot of the books that I planned on reading and finally got started on the Percy Jackson series!  I have been meaning to pick these books up forever so I can finally understand what all of the hype is about.  I plowed through the first two and plan on finishing the series itself by October.

If you click on any of the titles listed below, you will be taken to Goodreads so that you can read a description of the novel.

Books I read:

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

Just One Day by Gayle Forman

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan

Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss

Audiobooks I listened to:

In the After by Demetria Lunetta

Halfway to the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

One Foot in the Grave by Jeaniene Frost

At Grave's End by Jeaniene Frost

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

Unfortunately, this is where it all slows down.  University has officially started and considering my major is Literature, the majority of my reading will have to be devoted to my classes.  The good news is that this is my last semester.  The bad news is that it means I had to jam pack four high level lit courses into one semester.  I'm prepared to be sinking in papers by the time September rolls to an end.

For school:

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano

Lilus Kikus and Other Stories by Elena Poniatowska

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass

Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by Ellen and William Craft

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

For fun:

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Magic Bites by Ilona Andrews

A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness

Commanded to his Bed by Denise Lynn

Rumble by Ellen Hopkins

Audiobooks:

In the End by Demitria Lunetta

True to the Highlander by Barbara Longley 

The Neon Rain by James Burke

Steelheart by Brandon Sanderson

Timebound by Rysa Walker

My drive to and from school takes me at least an hour every day, so I always seem to have ample time to listen to audiobooks, which is why I'm comfortable putting five here.  As for the ones I'm reading for fun, two are for the Vaginal Fantasy Book Club, two are for the BOOKSPLOSION book club and one is my Bathroom Book of the Month, which I'll write more about later.