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teawithcthulhu 's review for:
The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
A pretty tone poem loaded with atmosphere and good taste and great clothes and amazing food and beautiful dreamy magical artifice, and then failed to go anywhere.
If anything I would have preferred there to be no plot instead of this vague thing that has no narrative thrust, has barely-there stakes that nobody knows about until the very end, and the slowest oozy movement that shambles along between its timelines (of which there are split timelines for Some Artistic Reason) and falls face-forward into a climax that was so obvious and unexciting that I wanted to rewind the book back to the parts where there was no plot and things were still mysterious and interesting. The more I learned about the plot's premise and the main characters, the more boring I found them. The climax and revelation of why any of this stuff was happening was so pathetically weak and uninteresting that it retroactively made me dislike the earlier parts of the book that I had enjoyed, because it threw into light how undeveloped the plot and characters were, and made me realize...oh, that's it? We really didn't get very far then. Why pretend to have a plot if you're not going to put any work into developing it because you're too busy describing the majesty of a painted clock?
But at least it was pretty.
If anything I would have preferred there to be no plot instead of this vague thing that has no narrative thrust, has barely-there stakes that nobody knows about until the very end, and the slowest oozy movement that shambles along between its timelines (of which there are split timelines for Some Artistic Reason) and falls face-forward into a climax that was so obvious and unexciting that I wanted to rewind the book back to the parts where there was no plot and things were still mysterious and interesting. The more I learned about the plot's premise and the main characters, the more boring I found them. The climax and revelation of why any of this stuff was happening was so pathetically weak and uninteresting that it retroactively made me dislike the earlier parts of the book that I had enjoyed, because it threw into light how undeveloped the plot and characters were, and made me realize...oh, that's it? We really didn't get very far then. Why pretend to have a plot if you're not going to put any work into developing it because you're too busy describing the majesty of a painted clock?
But at least it was pretty.