I first read The Night Circus in 2019, and before I dive into The Starless Sea, I wanted to go back to the story that has been rattling around in my head ever since. This isn’t a fresh-from-the-final-page review. It’s a look at what stuck with me, what changed with time, and what I see differently now.

There is something strange about a circus appearing in a field.

Maybe that premise is supposed to feel inherently fantastical, but growing up in the South, it didn’t seem quite as impossible to me. I remember small traveling circuses that seemed to materialize in empty fields. One day there was nothing there, and suddenly there were tents, lights, performers, fire, animals, and people doing things that were technically possible but still didn’t quite feel real.

That is part of what made Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus so interesting to me.

The circus in the novel takes that feeling and pushes it just past the edge of reality. There are tents and performers and crowds, all recognizable things. Then there are experiences that should be impossible. The ordinary and the magical sit beside each other so comfortably that, after a while, you almost stop asking which is which.
For the characters encountering the circus, particularly those who don’t completely understand what they have walked into, there is this wonderful uncertainty: Is this what a circus is supposed to be? Is all of this normal? Am I the only person who doesn’t know?

I loved that.

It reminded me of being a kid and having nothing bigger or fancier against which to measure those little traveling circuses. I didn’t know whether what I was seeing was impressive by circus standards. I just knew it was incredible.

That tension between what is real and what only feels real runs throughout the book.

I was also fascinated by Marco. Unlike Celia, whose magical ability is tied closely to who she is and the world she was born into, Marco is selected and trained. His abilities are developed through years of study and discipline. There is something appealing about that idea. Power is not presented only as an extraordinary gift bestowed upon an extraordinary person. At least some of it can be learned.

It gave his side of the competition an almost underdog quality that I enjoyed.

But there was another part of The Night Circus that I experienced very differently, and this is where I realized how much reality we carry with us even when we are reading fantasy.

At the center of the novel are Celia and Marco, two people bound into a competition before they have any meaningful ability to choose it. Eventually, that relationship becomes a love story. There is something intensely romantic about the idea that two people might be pulled toward one another by forces larger than themselves. Literature is full of star-crossed lovers, soulmates, destiny, and people who seem to have been meant for each other before they ever met.

For some readers, that can be pure escapism.
I can’t quite read it that way.

I grew up with the idea that there was someone you were supposed to marry, and I ultimately experienced an arranged marriage myself. Because of that history, predetermined romantic destiny doesn’t automatically feel romantic to me.

I know what the loss of choice can look like outside a fantasy novel.

That doesn’t mean I think Morgenstern’s love story fails. In some ways, it made it more interesting to me. I found myself reading the romance through two sets of eyes at once.

One part of me could appreciate the fantasy of two people drawn together by something almost magical.

The other kept asking: But where is choice?
And perhaps that is what stayed with me most about The Night Circus.

We often talk about fantasy as an escape from reality, but readers don’t actually leave reality behind when they open a book. We bring our histories, our experiences, our fears, and our ideas about love and power with us.

For me, The Night Circus exists right on that seam.
A circus can be a collection of tents in a field, or it can be an impossible world that appears without warning.

Magic can be something you are born with, or something you painstakingly learn.

Destiny can be breathtakingly romantic, or it can look unsettlingly like the absence of choice.
Perhaps the most interesting question isn’t where reality ends and fantasy begins.

It is what happens when the reality a reader brings with them enters the fantasy too.

And maybe none of us ever walk into the circus empty-handed.

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The Night Circus
by Erin Morgenstern
Published by Doubleday
Originally published in 2011

Book link: Clicking the book title or cover will take you to The Read Rover’s Bookshop.org store. I may earn a small commission from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you.