Night Circus

Night Circus was a very interesting read for me, being heavily fantastical, and, although with a bit too much in the way of prose at times, I really liked the world that the novel was built around and how ingrained the concept of magic was involved in the characters lives and setting. The whimsical and otherworldly aesthetics of the whole circus itself is very original and really seems like a world in itself. There seems to be a lot of different themes in this book, I found it a little hard to follow the narrative sometimes, at points I felt like the novel was spending a bit too much time trying to explain the world and setting rather than progressing the story along. But I did like the writing of the characters and the clear themes around their own relationships with one another. I did think that this book had a similar theme to Romeo and Juliet. The two main protagonists, Marco and Celia, are being trained and placed into a magical competition to see who will continue on in the circus. These competitions, as it's later learned, have been going on for years, and normally result in one of the competitors deaths. With their mentors pushing them to continue on, both Marco and Celia attempt to find a way to end the competition. But when another performer attempts to murder Marco, it results in both him and Celia essentially becoming ghosts, and eventually finding a way to end the game at stalemate, preserving the circus but ending the competition.