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A review by alicihonest
The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson
2.0
A weird book, but not weird in the sinister and foreboding way it was so, so desperately trying to achieve. In fact, while technically sinister things happened, the pacing and total lack of ability to summon up any dramatic tension just failed the concept completely.
I'm a sucker for the concept, it's that old "young adults create a subculture to do scandalous or just fun but strange things in the theme of some antiquity but everything goes deadly wrong and also there's an inappropriate sexual proclivity here somewhere," an attempt in the spirit of A Secret History, The Finishing School, The Lake of Dead Languages, If We Were Villains, sort of The Shadow Year, but it's so bad. The pacing is bad, the characters are ill developed, it's too short to make anything that happens seem important, the characters all have the same voice which is bizarre, that one voice is stilted and formal in an inexplicable way (it would work for 1.5 of them but not all of them), and things are brought up and have inordinate amounts of time spent on them with no payoff or reflection whatsoever.
I would be prepared to be forgiving to this book if it were the author's first work, but it's not. It's earnest, and I can appreciate what she was trying to go for. But at this point, she needs to be better at getting there. It's short, so it's not a waste of much time, but it's a pathetic attempt at a novel.
I'm a sucker for the concept, it's that old "young adults create a subculture to do scandalous or just fun but strange things in the theme of some antiquity but everything goes deadly wrong and also there's an inappropriate sexual proclivity here somewhere," an attempt in the spirit of A Secret History, The Finishing School, The Lake of Dead Languages, If We Were Villains, sort of The Shadow Year, but it's so bad. The pacing is bad, the characters are ill developed, it's too short to make anything that happens seem important, the characters all have the same voice which is bizarre, that one voice is stilted and formal in an inexplicable way (it would work for 1.5 of them but not all of them), and things are brought up and have inordinate amounts of time spent on them with no payoff or reflection whatsoever.
I would be prepared to be forgiving to this book if it were the author's first work, but it's not. It's earnest, and I can appreciate what she was trying to go for. But at this point, she needs to be better at getting there. It's short, so it's not a waste of much time, but it's a pathetic attempt at a novel.