September Reviews

This is already late, so I'm just jumping right into the reviews-- great month all around!

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

I got this book from a free little library in San Diego while I was traveling over Labor Day weekend, thinking I'd heard the title before but couldn't remember anything about the story. 

The circus arrives unannounced. Open only at night and filled to the brim with seemingly impossible tricks and wonders, each tent is a marvel. But the circus is only the stage for a much bigger magical competition; Marco and Celia have been linked together to compete from a young age, but with each passing moment they spend together they're more drawn to the other, an impossible attraction that could spell the end of everything that they've created.

This was nearly 500 pages of gorgeous pieces slowly becoming a cohesive circus and story. It follows Marco and Celia, but also other aspects of the circus and the people who love it, all of them tangled in the web of story and competition. The magic is wondrous, the characters enormous and standing on their own in a cast the size of a circus, and the jumbled time line of it all drives the story with a heavy sense of urgency; something is coming, and you must keep going to find out what.

I can't express how lovely the writing is, but it's also very aware of how convoluted a magic circus could get, bogged down by specifics and questions that can't truly be answered, and it carries it all with a graceful sense of suspension of disbelief. The magic works because someone else in the story knows how, and it's okay that we don't know. 

I loved the setting and how it jumped between certain years, dawning into the 1900s with fire and wonder and then shuttling us back to the 1890s to provide a peek behind the curtain.

Overall I really, really liked this story.

Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver

On a trip to visit a friend, both my dear friend and her mother recommended this book as one of their favorites, going so far as to send me home with their copy.

Codi Noline has never felt at home anywhere. With her sister Hallie off to help the farmers in Nicaragua, Codi is left adrift in the town they grew up in, reckoning with her estranged ailing father and a town that she felt could never accept her. Seeking meaning in the familiar, Codi wrangles with her past and present, hoping to find something that resembles a future.

This book. Holy shit this book. I've never read a Barbara Kingsolver book before, and now I feel like I have to find out if her others are this touching and profound. What a look at human nature, at belonging and grief and home, at the desire for a sense of purpose, a broader direction, at the deep need for human connection. It tackles environmental problems in a way that feels both big and interruptible, it looks grief and loss in the eye and says I see you, this is life.

It's also funny, looking at a small town with both reverence and judgment. Codi's perspective is one of desperation and displacement, and the few chapters interspersed from her father's perspective are beautiful and revealing, as he falls deeper into his dementia. 

It meanders sometimes, but always with purpose. This is Codi's story, her search for family and belonging, and each step she takes carries a new sense of wonder with her doubt.

The last few chapters hit with an unexpected hurt, and I cried through the last chunk of the book. But the catharsis is there, the healing is there, and it was such a wonder to find home at the end of this story.

Overall I absolutely loved this book. I'm at the perfect to read it too, which was wonderful.

The Unworthy by Agustina Bazterrica, translater by Sarah Moses

I have a branch of my local library about a mile from me, so on the last weekend of summer, I walked to the library and picked out a book I knew I'd like and an experimental book I wanted to try. This was the experimental book.

The nameless narrator lives in the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, a post apocalyptic convent where the women, the Unworthy, live in fear of the Superior Sister and resentful of one another, hoping for the chance to become a Chosen or an Enlightened. But doubt creeps through the corners of faith, qnd the narrator begins to remember her life before the convention, questioning the order under which they all live and die.

I didn't realize this book was translated from Spanish, so this translator did a marvelous job conveying this world and this story. This story and all the characters within it are super fucked up and so fascinating. It's advertised as a political commentary, and it absolutely is, in addition to a religious commentary about the power of both belief and doubt. 

There is a lot of violence in this book-- sexual assault and rape, self mutilation, torture, gruesome death, and more. It's a world where disease and starvation have ravaged the population, and those who have survived have done so by the brutal destruction of others. It's a story about greed and sabotage, about the selfish desire to live and the dangerous power of holding yourself as greater than others.

It's a quick read, fast paced a brutal, as the nameless narrator writes in her forbidden journal, bloody and questioning even from the beginning. Her journey from devout unworthy to doubting protector is one of remembrance and empathy, and I tore through it in like two days. 

If you struggle with books featuring heavy topics like the ones above, this book may be more difficult, but I think it's a masterful look at how easy it is to succumb to cultist thinking if you don't have other support or the ability to ask questions without harm. I think it's an important book to read, especially now.

Buried Deep and Other Short Stories by Naomi Novik

Reawakening the library kid inside me who has been dormant for a long time, this was the other book I picked up on my library trek. I've really liked everything I've read from Novik so far, so this felt like a no trainer.

It's a collection of short stories, all fantasy, but each with a very different plot and set of characters. I had favorites, but generally thought all of them were interesting and well written. I loved the world building and lore that went into each, and how every story carried so much different magic.

Overall I really enjoyed this compilation-- if you've read and liked Novik's stories, this is a great addition to her stories.

Truly a great month for reading, I really loved all of these books.

See you next month!

Literary recommendation: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik

Media recommendation: I've really been enjoying Dropout's Dimension 20 season Cloudward, Ho!