A book with magic. It is a pretty well-known fact about me that the Harry Potter series is my favorite series of all. Would I have loved to simply re-read the entire series for this category? Absolutely. However, I chose to read The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern instead. I came across this book doing a search on GoodReads, and I am glad that I did.
This is the first book of the challenge that has truly taken me the allotted full-week to read. I finished it just this morning. As I read it, I felt it was taking me a very long time, however when I finished it, I wished I had been able to spend even more time with it. Not because the ending wasn't satisfactory and I NEEDED to know more, but because the story is so complex and plot lines so inner twined that I wish I had been able to spend more time deeply thinking about each aspect of it before having to move on to the next.
The very basic plot of this book is that there are two magicians who have been running this "game" for many, many, many years (decades, maybe even centuries). For their game, they each choose one student to train in their own way. The two magicians have very different ideas about how magic and illusion is best taught. So, these two students train for many years and then the game begins. One student makes a move and the other moves back. The two students are each unaware of who their opponent is and are basically in the dark about the rules of the game. This book focuses on one of these games. Two magicians who initially strive to make their teacher proud by winning the game; but, through a series of events, the game is transformed into so much more.
This book is formatted in a way that as the chapters change, so does the location, the year, the characters. Until you get the hang of it, it can be a little confusing. The confusion all pays off in the end. Morgenstern is able to bring each story line together piece by piece and leads to a wonderful conclusion. I THINK that this is the first and only book published by Erin Moregnstern so far. To be honest, I am excited to get my hands on anything new that she might write. The book was very well written and truly made me feel part of the circus (I even noticed that I picked out an outfit of all black and white, totally subconsciously). Appropriately called "The Circus of Dreams," when I finished the book this morning I sent a quick text to a friend that said, "Now all I want to do is stay in bed and dream about this book."
Ultimately, I genuinely enjoyed this book. I felt empathy for each character -- even the ones I didn't like. I laughed (a little), I cried (a little more), I didn't want the end to come. The book, while filled with magic and things that might be difficult to believe, is smart. It really gets the reader thinking. It is funny because near the end one of the characters mentions that there really isn't "magic," that what we think of as "magic" is really just the way the world is but we aren't willing/able to understand it. There are so many possibilities out there, why shouldn't we all be a little more open-minded?
5 Stars! (Read this book!)
P.S. On a kinda unrelated note, as a teacher I often feel left behind. With the subjects I teach, I often spend 4 years with some of my students. This can be every day in class, plus weekend competitions, and out of town trips. I truly get to know these kids. Then they are gone. There is a quote from The Night Circus that I really felt related to this feeling. It states, "A project is started, it is developed and sent out into the world, and more often than not it becomes self-sufficient. And then he is no longer needed. It is not always a pleasant position to be in, but it is the way of such things...." This is said in relation to the character who begins the circus. It's one of many projects that he puts care and time into, then it is able to fully run on it's own, unneeded. That pretty much sums up my life as a debate coach. Haha.