When you uncork one you are enveloped by a mixtures of scents: For example, another character, Widget, creates a tent of bedtime stories, full of tables and shelves stocked with all sizes and sorts of bottles. And each contains an element of emotional truth about our humanity, reminding me of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. The circus attractions are astoundingly creative: a pool of tears where you drop in a stone to leave your grief behind, a cloud maze where you climb “a series of platforms swooping in odd, diaphanous shapes, quite similar to clouds” and jump from them without injury. There is much that I loved about this book. Of course, the two young people fall in love, just to make things harder. In this round, Celia and Marco will be their proxies and the circus their gameboard.Īfter a long introductory section devoted mostly to their training, Celia and Marco begin devising magical attractions for the circus, aware that they are competing (though initially Celia does not know with whom), but not what the stakes are. These two father figures, whom we later discover are fantastically ancient, profoundly disagree about the place of magic in the world and long ago devised a competition to prove their respective points. The two main characters are Celia and Marco, whom we first meet as small children who have come under the care of two magicians. Thus we enter the minds of no less than fifteen characters. The point of view is third-person omniscient, meaning that the story is told from the perspective of a distant and unnamed consciousness who knows everything that goes on in people’s hearts. It is the story of a circus, one that “arrives without warning” and whose tents and even the ground around them are black and white. Judging by reader reviews, this is a book you love or hate.

September Fair by Jess Lourey