Adhara Female. Germany

Some books make you realize why you love reading and others, like "The Night Circus", can kill this appetite. I abandoned this a couple of weeks ago and still can't bring myself to pick up a new book, terrified by the question "What if it is as tedious as this one?"

I've read my fair share of bad books. However, I expected "The Night Circus" to be amazing -it has a circus and wizards, it's set at the end of the XIX Century and it came highly recommended by a friend whose taste I trust. What could go wrong? How could someone mix all those elements and come up with anything short of interesting?

Well, clearly it can and has been done. To begin with, the author hasn't quite grasped the "show, don't tell" concept. When the (very plain, very boring) characters go somewhere, we are told what this place feels like. We never feel. If they go to a cafe we are told the place was very French. Why? What made it French? Some candles on a table do not a French atmosphere make. We are told someone or somewhere is mysterious, while actually it's just lacking description. The writing style tries hard to be evocative and falls flat on its face. The interesting bits you may have read about on the jacket or other synopsis flop. Here and there the author throws foreign words that are supposed to make the characters look worldly and sophisticated, but it just reads like the idea of Paris or London that a college student may have after spending two weeks in Europe, being ripped off by locals as only clueless tourists can be.

The same goes for the age the book is set on. We find a date at the beginning of each chapter. Sometimes character remember they're supposed to be fancy and Victorian, and mumble something that is supposed to sound fancy and Victorian, but for the most part we could just as well be reading a story set in 2010.

All in all "The Night Circus" reminds me of a saying we have in Spain: "Querer y no poder" - it roughly translates as "To want but not be able to" and refers to people or, in this case, books that want to achieve something and fail. It desperately wants to be mysterious, it desperately wants to be magical, it desperately wants to wake up the same kind of feelings a circus show would wake up in a kid, on the age before the Internet. However that seems to be a task way, way out of the reach of its author, and the whole book is just a failed attempt, and a transparent one at that.

I wasn't able to finish the book. It gets two stars because it's refreshing to see a paranormal romance that doesn't involve the girl falling in love with the vampire in the first two pages, plus Sunshine had her nice moments.

However this could do nothing against the crazy amount of infodump the reader is subjected to at the worst possible moments. Whenever a climactic plot point was approaching, the story would stop on its tracks, breaking pace completely, so I could get ten pages of explanations that had been kept from me until then, and could have been mentioned before. Of course this brand new information would suddenly change everything we were expecting. It was bewildering the first time and got progressively infuriating. I got halfway through the book and this had happened already four or five times times. Along with the fact that Sunshine will spend 40 pages running around the exact same ideas ("oh no! does this mean i have a bond with a vampire? doesn't it? does it? a bond with a vampire! how do i feel about this? do i have one? no? oh god, i may have a bond with a vampire!") while hiding important information that should have, at some point, creeped up in her mental soliloquies instead of being dumped on you the next time she faces a crisis ("surprise! i'm a wizard!").