While attention this lavish might make some readers skeptical, get ready to be won over: “The Night Circus’’ largely lives up to the accolades. Startlingly inventive, haunting, and definitely strange, it’s part love story, part fable, and a knockout debut - with a back story nearly as surprising.
Morgenstern grew up in Marshfield and studied theater and studio art at Smith College. After graduating in 2000, she went to work as an office temp and moved to Salem and later Boston, where she now lives. A talented artist, she sold her paintings after quitting temp work and also created the Phantomwise Tarot deck, which has the same black and white color scheme of her novel, and incorporates Egyptian mythology, Victoriana, and of course - circus motifs.
About six years ago, Morgenstern, who had never published fiction, decided to try her hand at it during National Novel Writing Month in November. She struggled with her manuscript off and on over the next several years, producing a work that was mostly vignettes not yet anchored to a plot. It was rejected by more than two dozen agents. Eventually a few agents offered her some encouragement, suggesting major revision. Morgenstern rewrote, found an agent, and her book sold in a week.
The reason why is apparent. Morgenstern doesn’t mess around, snatching you by the lapels with her first sentence: “The circus arrives without warning.’’ And this is no ordinary circus. Materializing at will, this turn-of-the-20th-century spectacle comes only at night and closes at dawn. When you enter, every sense is assaulted and transformed by the sights before you. A contortionist folds herself into a tiny glass box and vanishes in a puff of smoke. You can wander in a maze made up of puffy clouds. The food, right down to the chocolate mice with licorice tails, is its own kind of intoxicating wizardry.
But Le Cirque des Reves is here for a purpose. It becomes the setting for a desperate and deadly challenge, drummed up by two fierce rivals, Hector Bowen, known as Prospero the Enchanter, and another magician named Alexander.
