Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween

from

The Wicked Witch 

of the 

West! 

 

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
Published September 2011 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Source: this is my copy bought to read with the Omaha Bookworms

Publishers Synopsis:

The circus arrives without warning. No announcements precede it. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not. Within the black-and-white striped canvas tents is an utterly unique experience full of breathtaking amazements. It is called Le Cirque des Rêves, and it is only open at night.

But behind the scenes, a fierce competition is underway: a duel between two young magicians, Celia and Marco, who have been trained since childhood expressly for this purpose by their mercurial instructors. Unbeknownst to them both, this is a game in which only one can be left standing. Despite the high stakes, Celia and Marco soon tumble headfirst into love, setting off a domino effect of dangerous consequences, and leaving the lives of everyone, from the performers to the patrons, hanging in the balance.

My Thoughts:

 At some point in The Night Circus Morgenstern uses the word "enchanted" to describe Le Cirque des Reves. I had only just used the word "enchanting to describe this book. As in, I was utterly and completely under Morgenstern's spell almost throughout this book as she wove back and forth in time, back and forth between points of view. 

"The man billed as Prospero the Enchanter receives a fair amount of correspondence via the theater office, but this is the first envelope addressed to him that contains a suicide note, and it is also the first to arrive carefully pinned to the coat of a five-year-old girl."

As much as the circus is the centerpiece of the novel and certainly a character in the book, Morgensterns human characters carried the book for me and their story arc pulled me along. That little girl, Celia, tugged at my heartstrings from beginning to end.

 I'm sure I've mentioned here before that I have a problem with magic in books and it is what kept me from reading The Night Circus despite all of the rave reviews I've read. I needn't have let it concern me. The fact that magic was so central to the book took the story into the fantasy realm far enough for me to not try to reconcile it to reality yet it I was enough concerned with what was happening to the characters to often forget that magic was even a part of the story.

"Someone needs to tell those tales. When the battles are fought and won and lost, when the pirates find their treasures and the dragons eat their foes for breakfast with a nice cup of Lapsang souchon, someone needs to tell their bits of overlapping narrative. There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict. From the mundane to the profound."

Morganstern started The Night Circus seven years ago during NaNoWriMo. For those of you considering committing 50,000 words to paper in November, the lesson is to not give up at the end of the month - keep at that book. Tweak it, edit it, add to it, delete from it...stay with it. You never know what your vision might become.

Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos

Falling Together by Marisa de los Santos
Published October 2012 by HarperCollins Publishers
Source: my copy courtesy of TLC Book Tours and the publisher in exchange for this review

Synopsis from the publisher:

It's been six years since Pen Calloway watched Cat and Will, her best friends from college, walk out of her life. Through the birth of her daughter, the death of her father, and the vicissitudes of single motherhood, she has never stopped missing them. When, after years of silence, Cat—the bewitching, charismatic center of their group—urgently requests that the three meet at their college reunion, Pen can't refuse. But instead of a happy reconciliation, what awaits is a collision of past and present that sends Pen and Will on a journey around the world, with Pen's five-year-old daughter and Cat's hostile husband in tow. And as Pen and Will struggle to uncover the truth about Cat, they find more than they bargained for: startling truths about who they were before and who they are now.

My review:

De los Santos is the author of Love Walked In and Belong to Me. I have them both; I haven't read either of them. So I can't tell you whether or not you're going to like this one because you liked those or dislike this one because you disliked one or the other of those. What I can tell you is that I liked this book...a lot. I think as much for the fact that it was a book that came into my hands at just the right time. I have not read a strictly women's fiction book for quite a while now and I was due. Plus this is a book about so many of the things I love a book to be about, friendship and family, plus de los Santos throws in a bit of mystery to make things interesting.

The characters in Falling Together felt real to me, maybe not exactly the kind of relationships I myself had/have but the kinds of relationships I imagine I would like to have had. As so many books do, this has, perhaps, a bit too much thrown in. It's not enough, for example, that Pen has a child, out of wedlock. Instead she has to have had her daughter with a man who was going through a divorce but ends up back with his wife and Pen ever after has to deal with the wife who hates her because she and Patrick had this child together. But I enjoyed de los Santos' writing enough to forgive her this and a plot that seemed to go on a little too long (again, as I so often find, a book that could have done with a bit  more editing to make it a little tighter). And I will, finally, get the other two books pulled out of where ever they are and get them read...although I may save them to read at just the right time so that I can enjoy them as much as I enjoyed this one.

To read other reviews of Falling Together, check out other reviews on the full tour. Thanks to the ladies at TLC Book Tours for including me on this tour.

Sunday Salon - October 28

Hoping this is finding all of my east coast friends, followers and family members safe and ready for Hurricane Sandy. Fingers crossed that "they" are wrong and this won't be as bad as predicted.

Here's What I'm:

Listening To: Foo Fighters's 1997 release "The Colour and the Shape. Fifty-two years old and these guys can still make me want to do a little head banging. And then my neck gets sore and my head starts to hurt - getting old sucks.

Watching: Lots and lots of baseball - Miss H has fallen in love with the sport and we have watched at least some of every single playoff game and the world series. Sadly, her beloved Yankees bowed out early but it looks like her choice to win the World Series might just sweep her grandpa's even more beloved Detroit Tigers. And the rotten kid doesn't even feel a bit guilty cheering against them.

Cooking: Ebelskivers (Danish pancakes) to celebrate the birthday of one of Mama Shepp's girls on Monday and today I'm making cheesecake to celebrate Papa's and my thirtieth wedding anniversary on Tuesday.

Making: Big changes in my basement. I've been tweaking it ever since Mini-him moved home but it just wasn't working for me. So yesterday I started a major rearranging project that I'm very happy with so far. Every single thing in the basement will get reviewed to see if it's worth finding a new home for and I am being ruthless. I've even gotten The Big Guy on board which is a rarity; he hates getting rid of anything. Must be my anniversary present from him!

Grateful for: Thirty years with The Big Guy. They have not always been easy years but we have also had so much happiness together, raised three wonderful children, and grown to understand what it means to be committed to one person for the rest of your life. I can't imagine anyone else I would rather spend another thirty years with!

Happy about: Having utterly overcome my dislike, in recent years, of fall. I have absolutely enjoyed the colors, the smells, the foods, even the cooling temperatures. I know it means winter is just around the corner (which I hate!), but this year I've refused to let that ruin three months for me.

Looking forward to: A nice quiet week with time to finish up my basement project, time to read, and time to get my house put back in order. Between a vacation trip and being sick, things have kind of fallen apart around here. What are you looking forward to this week?

I'm finishing up Marisa de los Santos' Falling Together for review this week and then I don't have a single book I'm committed to reviewing on schedule for the rest of the year. So, yeah, I guess I'm looking forward to reading whatever I feel like for the rest of the year. What are you reading?

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
Published April 2009 by Penguin Group
Source: this one is mine

In post-World War  II Britain, Faraday, a country doctor raised by working class parents, is called in to care for an ailing maid at Hundreds Hall, an 18th-century estate where his mother once worked as a maid. While there, Faraday befriends the family of the house, Mrs. Ayers, who continues to exude the charm and grace of a period which is fast fading, daughter Caroline who has returned home to care for her brother, and son Roderick who has returned from the war wounded.

Faraday begins treating Roderick's injuries, giving him an excuse to visit Hundreds often. He is drawn to the family and a way of life he has admired all of his life. But times are changing and the family is struggling to maintain their hold on their land and their way of life. The house and the family are both fading, as are those around them. An estate nearby has even had to be sold to an American family who bring with them a brother, and maybe an opportunity for Caroline to find a husband who can help the family.

In an effort to make an impression on the American family, the Ayers' host a cocktail party for their neighbors. But when disaster strikes during the party, it is only the start of a downward spiral for the family and the house. Faraday becomes more and more entangled with the Ayers but even he has a hard time finding an explanation for what's happening that makes sense. Is the cause madness or is there something evil about the house?

In The Little Stranger, Sarah Waters has crafted a story that echoes Gothic novels without resorting to the cliches they entail, largely because she has made the cause of the problems at Hundreds Hall ambiguous. Is there an evil presence at work, a ghost or an inherent evil in the house itself? Is everything that happens the result of one person's efforts to drive a family mad? Or is it merely the stress of the struggle to adjust to a new way of life? Has hysteria overtaken the family or is there a "some dark germ, some ravenous shadow-creature, some 'little stranger' spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself?"

The Little Stranger is as much a book about class structure and the advent of socialism in Britain following World War II as it is a book about a haunted house. At one point Faraday is trying to work out the issue with another doctor and he says " It's as if - well, as if something's slowly sucking the life out of the whole family." "Something is," the other doctor tells him. "It's called a Labour Government.The Ayers' problem - don't you think? - is that they can't, or won't, adapt." Faraday himself, whose parents worked themselves to death to send him to school to become something more, wrestles with with his own awe of the upper class, his desire to be a part of it.

Those who have read a number of Waters' books, and like this one, tell me it's not her best. Which makes me even more anxious to read more of her novels because I really, really liked this one a lot. Seriously, I was afraid to read parts of this book too late at night and I loved the subtle way Waters did that. Nothing in your face, no blood and gore, no "here's what you should be afraid of." It's just the way I like scary movies; the unknown is much more frightening to me than a vampire. The idea rather than the reality. In the end, I'm still not sure what happened at Hundreds Hall, leaving me still thinking about the book weeks after finishing it.