I
had been recommended The Night Circus for years, and I have no idea how I’d put
off reading it for so long!
Fairytale
retellings are some of my all-time favorite books, and while The Night Circus
is no fairytale, it has the same quality that I adore so much in those retellings:
lush, gorgeous atmosphere and beautiful prose.
The
circus itself is a delightful confection that comes to life in such vivid ways,
and as much time as you spend exploring its various tents with the characters,
there’s always a surprise in store. And there are so many mysteries and dark
secrets to unravel that I couldn’t help but devour the novel.
As
epic fantasy author Brandon Sanderson said in a lecture on writing fantasy
novels (and I’m heavily paraphrasing here), you have to choose when designing a
magic system whether you’re going for a sense of wonder or a tightly rule-bound
approach to magic.
In my own writing, I lean
towards the rule-bound approach, and I think that’s why I appreciate the
opposite so much—because I think it’s so much harder to do, and it really does
speak to my soul. To create a world that’s beautiful and dark and mysterious
(without being confusing), to rekindle that sense of wonder I felt as a child
first discovering my favorite fantasy stories…that is something rare and wonderful.
Rediscover the million-copy bestselling fantasy read with a different kind of magic, now in a stunning anniversary edition to mark 10 years since it's paperback debut.
The circus arrives without warning. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Against the grey sky the towering tents are striped black and white. A sign hanging upon an iron gates reads:
Opens at Nightfall Closes at Dawn
Full of breath-taking amazements and open only at night, Le Cirque des Reves seems to cast a spell over all who wander its circular paths. But behind the glittering acrobats, fortune-tellers…
The
Girl Who Fell Beneath The Sea charmed me with its beautiful style and
atmospheric tone.
I adored the underwater spirit-world setting and the
characters Mina meets there, and the romance was delightful. Especially the
ending…which I won’t spoil, but made for a showstopper of a scene.
In
fact, there were several cunning twists that I found both surprising and
extremely satisfying. When Mina first throws herself into the sea to appease
the Sea God, it seems there is no way she could substitute for his intended
bride, but gradually we readers see why it had to be her and how every piece of
the puzzle fits together perfectly.
Before
I stumbled across this book, I had been disappointed with most of my recent YA
fantasy reads, so it was an unexpected delight to find one that captivated me
so thoroughly.
Deadly storms. An ancient curse. Will her sacrifice save them all?
For generations, deadly storms have ravaged Mina's homeland. Her people believe the Sea God, once their protector, now curse them with death and despair. To appease him, each year a maiden is thrown into the sea, in the hopes that one day the 'true bride' will be chosen and end the suffering.
Many believe Shim Cheong - Mina's brother's beloved - to be the legendary true bride. But on the night Cheong is sacrificed, Mina's brother follows her, even knowing that to interfere is a death sentence. To save…
The
Dawn of Everything is a fairly dense academic
tome, but it was eye-opening and very important, and I thoroughly enjoyed
reading it.
In
world-building for my own books, I try very hard to start from the ground up,
rather than seizing common European-style settings and tropes, unless I want to
use them for a deliberate reason.And
The Dawn of Everything pushes against this Euro-centric worldview even harder,
arguing that most assumptions we make about various types of historic societies
are wrong, and our current paradigm is only a fleeting, non-representative
creation.
I
was especially fascinated to learn that the European Enlightenment was very
likely a result of Native American societies critiquing European society. Many
of these native societies have in fact experimented with different forms of
social structures over the millennia, and the ones the early settlers and
missionaries found were far more deliberate and well-thought-out than what
European societies had stumbled into.
This
is very different from what we view as the default, which is that our modern
society is the natural endpoint of a progression from hunter-gatherer tribes to
farmers to cities to industrialization to our world today.
I
found this a fascinating reminder that there are so many ways to build a world and
a society besides what we’re familiar with, and that it’s always important to
question underlying assumptions.
To
me, this is what I love about fantasy—that it gives us authors a chance to play
with those basic assumptions and subvert what seems immutable in our modern
world.
A dramatically new understanding of human history, challenging our most fundamental assumptions about social evolution—from the development of agriculture and cities to the origins of the state, democracy, and inequality—and revealing new possibilities for human emancipation.
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike—either free and equal innocents, or thuggish and warlike. Civilization, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a conservative reaction…
Her power is forbidden. But she's next in line for the throne. When Princess Kalleah is born with a forbidden magic power, her mother takes her into hiding to keep her safe.
Now, at eighteen, she is back to claim her throne. People with Kalleah's deadly power aren't allowed into the city of Baylore, let alone the palace. If she is to rule, her people will need to overcome centuries of prejudice against the forbidden races. But the timing for her return could not be worse. Can Kalleah win the throne and hold Baylore together?
