Books: My Thoughts on The Night Circus

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm going to say that this is probably more of a 3.5 for me than a 4.Read as part of the Read Your E-Reader Read-a-thon hosted by Raul (latinlector) and Janie (Bookworms Buddy)

For a good portion of this book, I felt disconnected from the story and the characters. I didn't form any kind of emotional connection to anything or anyone. My hatred of Prospero and his teaching method was the only kind of emotion I felt for a long time, and that only lasted when he was prominent in the story. Other than that, I was pretty much reading just to get to the end for a majority of the book.

The way the story was told was very confusing for me. The cast is pretty large and the story felt like each set of characters had their own stories, and then those stories were split up and alternated with other characters stories. Sometimes you would end a chapter and the next chapter would rewind a bit and bring you up to what you just read from a different character's perspective. It almost felt like 2 steps forward, one step back. I also felt like because we had several characters stories, jumping from character to character made the story choppy for me. I hoped that eventually it would all come together and make sense to me in the end, but waiting for that to happen was trying on my patience.

Towards the end of the book, I started to get pulled in, but I believe that was because the story started focusing on a couple specific sets of characters. These characters were ones that I was specifically interested in, which helped. In the end, I did find that I enjoyed the story that was told, but I did not love it.

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