{read: magical debut} The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

This book is imaginatively conceived, impeccably plotted, and elegantly written. The Night Circus is one of those books that makes you both happy and said when you're reading it. While you can't wait to find out what happens next, you're also dreading turning the last page.

The plot revolves around a "game" in which two illusionists train their students and pit them against each other. Yet the illusionists in question - in this case, Marco and Celia - don't know the rules of the game or its stakes. They start to find out what exactly they've become enmeshed in when they discover that one of the circus's performers was the winner of the game's last round.

Morgenstern explores the delicate interplay of love, trust, loyalty, responsibility, and consequences in this amazing first novel. While magic is part of the novel, it is the tool that the author uses to illuminate the characters and the relationships among them rather than the central showpiece of the story.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (Doubleday, 2011)
My rating: 5 stars

{read: debut novel} Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

This crisp debut novel by Amor Towles will transport you into the world of New York City in 1938. Katey Kontent (pronounced like the state of mind) and her roommate, Eve, are two secretaries trying to stretch $3 in a bar on New Year's Eve, 1937. Tinker Grey, a man of obvious means, buys them drinks, and this meeting ends up changing all of their lives. The three are just beginning to get to know each other when a terrible mishap alters the balance among them. How this affects the three of them and the choices they make during the rest of the year is told by Katey. I loved everything about Katey except her  name, which seems to belong in a comic strip. She's sharp, she's funny, and she's willing to take a chance to try to get what she wants. She'll sometimes surprise you with what she says and does. I could have read 100 more pages in her voice, but 1938 came to an end and so does this story. I especially loved these two paragraphs on p. 323:

It is a bit of a cliche to characterize life as a rambling journey on which we can alter our course at any given time--by the slightest turn of the wheel, the wisdom goes, we influence the chain of events and thus recast our destiny with new cohorts, circumstances, and discoveries. But for the most of us, life is nothing like that. Instead, we have a few brief periods when we are offered a handful of discrete options. Do I take this job or that job? In Chicago or New York? Do I join this circle of friends or that one, and with whom do I go home at the end of the night? And does one make time for children now? Or later? Or later still?


In that sense, life is less like a journey than it is a game of honeymoon bridge. In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions--we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

Don't miss this chance to immerse yourself in this era of New York City. You'll taste the martinis, smell the cigarette smoke, and hear the music from the clubs and parties that keep everyone up til the wee hours before they head into work, again, the next day.

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles (Viking Penguin, 2011)
My rating: 4 stars

{read: snippets from a debut novel} Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman

I've just started this, but it's so good so far that I wanted to share a few snippets in hopes of enticing some of you to read it before my review comes along.

Harri has recently emigrated from Ghana to London lives with his mother and sister in its housing projects. He's in Year 7. As the story opens, one of his classmates has been murdered.

Here are the snippets:

"I pretended like if I kept looking hard enough I could make the blood move and go back in the shape of a boy. I could bring him back alive that way."

"In England there's a hell of different words for everything. If's for if you forget one, there's always another one left over. It's very helpful."

"An orange lady got hit by a tro-tro, nobody even saw it coming. I pretended like all the oranges rolling everywhere were her happy memories and they were looking for a new person to stick to so they didn't get wasted."

{His friend Manik's father shows him how to tie a tie and how to take it off without untying it.}
"Now I'll never have to tie my tie my whole life. I beat the tie at his own game!"

If you liked Incendiary by Chris Cleave or Room by Emma Donoghue, this will be one you'll enjoy. I can't wait to read more.