The Night Circus

I still want to live in this book. I suppose I'll just have to settle for re-visiting it once a year or so.

The Night Circus is a fantastic, romantic story with just enough magic to intrigue and just enough description to let the reader's imagination run wild. It's a comfortable book, and it's perfect to take on vacation.

I liked it even better the second time through. I knew what was going to happen, so I was able to meander through the book a little more. I took my time and stretched out, and I caught a bunch of things I skipped right by on the first time when I just wanted to know how it all ended up. I still read it in essentially one sitting, but that's just because I happened to be at an airport and on a plane without much else to do.

The story felt richer this time around, as I picked up on some thematic background that I'd missed the first time through. Most notably the fear of ending up along that gets threaded through the story and ultimately pushes Marco and Celia to take the actions they do to ensure a future together, limited though that future may be.

But the heart of this book is the circus. The magical, enchanting circus. And so the character that I most want to be is Bailey, the normal person in all of this who runs away to join and save that circus. I'm not sure I'd ever do something like that in real life, but that's why we have books. And this is one that I'll eventually be measuring in copies owned rather than times read.

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