Spotlight: Erin Morgenstern by Theresa Gauthier

    

    Never has a book surprised me more than Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.  I read the book in four days, which isn’t unprecedented since I’m such a voracious reader, but this was a bit unusual. To read a book in just a few days takes concentration, determination, and a bit of obsession. That’s what The Night Circus inspired.

The book is about a circus, but not the kind you think. You won’t see clowns in colorful costumes and oversized shoes climbing out of a tiny car or elephants standing on their hind legs. 

Engrossing, compelling, and unique, the story unfolds around the true magic of the illusionists and magicians and the fans of the Night Circus. Everything about the circus is black and white—on the surface. Tents with black and white stripes, performers dressing in black and white—and beneath this bucking of the expectations conjured with the word “circus” there is love, magic, and rivalry. 

The magicians, Celia and Marco, have been trained from childhood for this duel or competition. An air of mystery surrounds the traveling entertainers, and the circus appears and disappears without notice or announcement. Something dark and sinister and not about the usual business of circuses is going on here, and though some have compared it to Harry Potter, I find that misleading. This is far more like Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke than anything else, but even that comparison seems shaky to me.

The characters are layered and real. Each inhabits their portion of the story anchoring it in both the familiar and unfamiliar but making it believable. Erin Morgenstern’s world building and her attention to detail makes the story come to life. 

I’ve heard that the book is being turned into a movie, but there’s no word yet on when that will happen. 

The most exciting news is that Books Illustrated will be publishing a Limited Edition of the book in late 2022. Anne Yvonne Gilbert is the illustrator and this should be a visual feast!

In the meantime, Erin Morgenstern’s second book, The Starless Sea, give us a different world to explore.

    Morgenstern’s second effort revolves around a mysterious library—and mysterious doesn’t do it justice. Magical,ephemeral, and almost more fairytale than reality, the library is a secret. It only comes to light for protagonist Zachary Ezra Rawlins when he discovers a book at his college library that seems to tell the story of his life, Rawlins has to find out how this could exist. He meets Dorian—something of an enigma—and Mirabel—a sort of a guardian of the library, he dives headfirst into the sometimes contradictory, sometimes frightening world.

Rawlins’s relationships with the characters and even with the worlds—for there are distinct differences between where he’s from and where the bulk of the story takes place—are complicated. The reader isn’t sure, as Rawlins himself isn’t sure—who to trust. 

Morgenstern’s talent is obvious as is her enviable ability to create such worlds and people them with characters who pull at the reader’s emotions. There are plot twists, magic, and a mastery of words and phrases that allow her to build her story in careful layers. I could neither have predicted what happened nor would I have wanted to. It’s far too much fun to allow her talent to lead you through the tale until you find yourself racing to the end desperate to know what happened while also unwilling for it to end.

With two such disparate books under her belt, I can’t help but wonder what’s next?