The Night Circus- Part One (Primordium): Chapter Nine (Associates and Conspirators) - I Get It, You're Rich

This chapter begins with Midnight Dinners, which Chandresh randomly decided to hold.

True to the name, the first course is served at midnight. First, the guests are friends, but the invitation to a Dinner becomes a sort of highly coveted prize.

There are no menus, but the food is always of amazing quality.

Chandresh is obsessed with creating an air of "nocturnal mystery", so the settings, mannerisms, and food reflects that as much as possible.

And then comes a description of the dessert that I suggest you don't read while hungry.

"The desserts are always astonishing. Confections deliriously executed in chocolate in butterscotch, berries bursting with creams and liqueurs. Cakes layered to impossible heights, pastries lighter than air. Figs that drip with honey, sugar blown into curls and flowers."

I can just imagine getting the invitation to one of these dinners, and just getting horribly sick/full while eating, and you have to sit and watch the other people stuff their faces with the prettiest food ever.

Anyway, more fluff about the extravagance: decor, entertainment, etc., etc.

The Midnight Dinner that is the focus of this chapter introduces us to the people who will run the Night Circus...oh, I'm sorry, Le Cirque des Reves:

Mme. Ana Padva- a ballerina. Not exactly sure what she does; not a very important character.

Mr. Ethan W. Barris- an engineer/architect. Most likely designed certain aspects of the circus.

Tara and Lainie Burgess- the "twins" every large group apparently has, who apparently "do a little bit of everything", which means they don't do anything.

And of course, the man in the grey suit, who is now, infuriatingly to my grammar quirks, is now known as "Mr. A. H-", because a period cannot contain his name, which, chances are, is not his actual name.

There are some other people important to the story, but I'm not exactly sure when they come in. Marco is serving as Chandresh's assistant.

They talk and eat, so on and so on, and when they finish dinner around two in the morning, they get down to business, talking in the stereotypical "I'm incredibly rich, much more than you" sort of way, drinking brandy and coffee on couches and armchairs.

Chandresh describes his plan for the circus, and here I need to put in another long quote:

"'It is merely in conceptual stages, and that is why I ask you all here now, for the inception and development. What it needs is style, panache. Ingenuity in its engineering and structure. To be infused with the mesmerizing, and perhaps a touch of mystery. I believe you are the proper group for this undertaking. If any of you disagree, you are welcome to leave but I respectfully request you speak of this to no one. I prefer that these plans be kept undisclosed entirely, at least for now. Very sensitive at this point, after all.'"

This chapter ends with another three-to-four hours' worth of the group poring over the charts and diagrams and writing twice as many new ones.

Chapter Ten should be out by next Sunday.

The Night Circus- Part One (Primordium): Chapter Eight (Truth or Dare) - Finally, a Child Who Isn't Abused!

Following that useless little second-person babble, this chapter begins with the introduction of a refreshing character that isn't a perfectionist or pitiful: Bailey Clarke.

He, his sister Caroline and her friend, as well as two other children, are perched in an oak tree, and Caroline asks him truth or dare, a game that has apparently been around in the same form as today at least since 1897.


Also this chapter marks the point at which the timeline goes all screwy, because this takes place 13 years after the other events in the book.

Really making this easy for me, Morgenstern. 'Preciate it.

My frustration aside, Bailey chooses "Dare", and his sister, a wonderful plot-developing tool, tells him he has to break in the Night Circus and bring back proof.

He accepts, as the Night Circus has arrived in...wait...Bailey lives in Concord, Massachusetts?

I really didn't read this book carefully the first time around, or at least I didn't read the little captions at the beginning of each chapter very carefully.

Annnyway, back to 19th century truth or dare.

The casual walk to the circus provides Bailey with just enough time for some backstory, and we find out that:

1. The Night Circus apparently thinks Concord, Massachusetts is a significant enough place for a return trip, because they stopped there five years ago.

2. Using the maths, Bailey is "not quite" eleven.

3. Bailey loves the circus. Like seriously.

When he gets to the circus, he sees that under the sign describing the opening and closing time, there are letters saying:

"Trespassers Will Be Exsanguinated"

According to Dictionary.com:

"exsanguinate: to drain of blood; make bloodless"

Yeesh.

Wandering through the empty grounds and for some reason staring at the ground and mentally describing the dirt, yes the dirt, in detail, he nearly runs into a girl.

And here is where (spoilers) the hopelessly romantic part of me screams into a pillow in anticipation.

No, this isn't Celia either. Based on the timeline, Celia, right now, is in her late twenties, and Marco, his early thirties, and around this time, they're pretty busy with the competition...and each other.
Yet another lovely and awful-in-hindsight run-on sentence that I'm gonna leave in.

Oh, I am all over the place with this one.

The girl, who has red hair, is about his age, and is wearing "a white dress made from bits of every fabric imaginable, scraps of lace and silk and cotton all combined into one" that I would pay so much money for.

At first, she confronts him about going where he's not supposed to, but offers to lead him out the way he came.

When they get to the fence, he thanks her, but then remembers that he was supposed to bring proof.
I'm about to quote about a half-page of the book, something Eliana hates, but sorry, I can't think of a good enough way to recap this.

"'Bring something back?' she repeats.
'Yeah,' Bailey says, looking down at his scuffed brown shoes, and at her white boots on the other side of the fence. 'It was a dare,' he adds, hoping she will understand.
The girl smiles. She bites her lip for a second and looks thoughtful, and then she pulls off one of her white gloves and hands it to him through the bars. Bailey hesitates.
'It's okay, take it,' she says. 'I have a whole box of them.'
Bailey takes the white glove from her and puts it in his pocket.
'Thank you,' he says again.
'You're welcome, Bailey,' the girl says, and this time when she turns away he does not say anything, and she disappears behind the corner of a striped tent."

More screeching from my inner hopeless romantic.

This chapter ends with both Bailey and me being confused by the girl knowing his name (her name is Poppet, by the way), because as far as I know, she's one of the circus's only residents that isn't magical.

Chapter Nine should be out before next Saturday.

As I said here: http://midnightharbor.blogspot.com/2015/03/sorry.html,my review schedule is going to slow down, and that's going to start Monday. I'm still going to do my absolute best to stick to the one-post-per-week minimum, but they might be more spread out than they are now.

Handle With Care

Hi readers!

Sorry it took so long for this post, but it's here now! 

So... I'm going to make this really short because although I loved this book, I'm finding it hard to write a lengthy review on it, so here goes!

Basically, this book is full of depression, and just as you start to really love the characters, one dies. Anyway, the O'Keeffe's  center around their daughter, Willow. As she has OI, her treatment and equipment cost a small fortune, sending their family into poverty. Sean is a police officer and because his wife cannot work, he has to work around the clock to make ends meet. Not to mention that the older daughter, Amelia, gets little attention due to her sister being the center of her parents world. Which, surprise surprise, leads to her being bulimic. 

Later, Willow breaks both of her femurs at Disneyland, and her parents try to sue, not because they believe Disneyland did anything wrong, but because they need the money for Willow. Instead of getting a case against Disneyland, they get a wrongful birth suit, something that will require Charlotte to say that she doesn't love Willow in front of a jury. This case is going against Charlotte's obstetrician, who happens to be her best friend.

I wont get into many details, but this suit causes Charlotte and Sean to grow apart, and in Sean's case, cheat and file for divorce. Charlotte wins the case for $8 million, but just weeks after...

I'm not going to spoil it for you guys unless you want me to.

Anyway, to make up for lost time, I will start to review The Selection, and then continue with The Elite and The One. I will probably go by chapter, and hopefully the first two chapters will be out by later today or tomorrow. 

And before I forget, happy pi day!

One more thing before I go, Harry Potter or Twilight? Tell us your answer in the comments below!

The Night Circus- Part One (Primordium): Second-Person Thingy (Darkness and Stars) - Impressive

This half-page or so of second-person stuff begins with you entering the circus.

Once you enter through a striped curtain, everything around you is dark, and you feel your way through a tunnel-like structure until you open another curtain, behind which is blinding light.
And that's it.

Invigorating.

International

Greetings, earthlings!
Audrey here.

It's been 24 days since I began this blog on a whim. 
In that time, quite a bit has happened, one of the more recent of which is the reason for this post (not sure if that sentence was grammatically correct, but I'm just going to stick with it).

Our blog has been viewed over 200 times in the past 24 days, something I'm very proud of. And recently, our views have extended outside of the United States, to Russia, Taiwan, China, Brazil, and Macau (which Google tells me, sorry for my limited geographical knowledge, is off the coast of China, as well as a good deal of ambivalence as to whether it's a country or not).

The purpose of this post, I suppose, is to welcome. Not just those of you who view this blog from outside of North America, but everyone. We truly do value the consumption of our content by your retinas, optic nerves, and eventually, visual cortexes.

Now that sappy gratitude is over, to any bots who are corrupting our pageview count, kindly 1000111 1010100 1000110 1001111.
(some binary that I had to look up)

Well, farewell! The next chapter of my The Night Circus review will be up by next Friday.