The Night Circus -- Guest Book Blog by Jackie Garlick Pynaert

This week has me thoroughly inundated with Book One of the NEVER SKY Trilogy winding down, and Book Two gearing up. Here to help out this week is my friend, the one and only Jackie Garlick Pynaert, to talk about the highly-acclaimed  best-selling novel, THE NIGHT CIRCUS. Welcome, Jackie, and thank you!

“What’s A Little Magic Among Friends?”

‘A friend in need is a friend in deed.’

Thus, when I received the call (via a random email) re line: “Read Any Good Books Lately? Wanna Help Me Out?”

I said, hell yes, to both requests and viola, like magic **un blog de guest appears. **

(Translation: while Veronica conducts some serious, behind-the-scenes magic, you get to enjoy a guest blog written by, none other than, moi.) 

The magical wannabe, Jacqueline Garlick Pynaert

BTW, these puns and equally pathetic French references are never going to get old, because the book I’ve chosen to RAVE about today is the fabulously enchanting, or should I say, fabuleusement enchanteur - The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.

a.k.a., Le Cirque des Reves.

If you haven’t read it yet, you must. You simply must.

But a word of caution, before delving into its deliciously decadent and verbally gilded prose; this is not a book for the faint of heart. Meaning: This book requires you to ‘think,’ while you read.

My favourite kind.

(And yes, it is ‘favourite’ with a ‘u’, because I’m Canadian.)

I always know it’s a good book when this happens. I read the first paragraph and without taking my eyes from the page, start groping the nearby coffee table for my highlighter, thinking to myself, self, this is so incredibly well written, let me just mark a few memorable passages. And the next thing you know, things get looking a little, ‘yellow’.

Pertaining to the plot, some will argue this a book about a circus. Others will insist it’s a book about two, young, unlikely love-smitten, magicians trained since childhood, to partake in a cruel competition of fantastical heights. Others will assert, there’s more to the plot than meets the eye.

And they’d be right.

In this, her debut novel, Morgenstern creates a tantalizing multi-layered experience for her readers, weaving the sub pots of a plenitude of alternating secondary characters whose lives, get this, affect the circus, as well as, are affected by what the circus has to offer. You see…the circus itself, is a cleverly crafted character in Morgenstern’s book. Some may argue, the main character, off which, all the rest are played.

Hmmmmm…  See, I warned you -- thought provoking.

Nevertheless, anyway you look at it, the delicious visual descriptions, and enticing visceral illusions, depicted within the pages of this book, guarantee to transcend its readers, not only to another time and place, but among the tents of an extraordinarily, captivating and fantastically circus. The experience of which far exceeds anything worldly, bar none.

Not to mention, this book boasts, not one, but two killer opening lines:

Case in point:

In, Anticipation (ie: A Prologue of sorts…)

1) “The circus arrives without warning.”

Magnificent, non?  Hell, yes. Yet incredibly passé, when compared to the sheer brilliance of…

In, Unexpected Post  (ie: A Chapter One of sorts…)

2) “The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl.”

Ok, seriously. Shut. Up.

Damn, I wish I’d written those lines…

Jackie