Friday 1 September 2017

Book Review - City of Circles by Jess Richards



This is a magical love story involving two circus performers. Although some may find it magical and entertaining, I rather felt it a bit slow and cumbersome.

The story itself is based around a girl, Danu, overcoming her grief and guilt at the death of her parents. Her only reminder of her mother is a locket, given to Danu on her mothers deathbed. Inside this locket she finds more questions than answers, as she travels with a moving circus as a tightrope walker to her home city - the magical Matryoshka.

I liked the atmospheric feel of the book. The circus environment was exciting and well detailed. I felt at times as though I had stepped into this other world of Matryoshka as the author did a really good job of describing it, and I enjoyed the process of exploring it with Danu and Morrie. However, there's no real sense of what's occurring outside of this environment. I couldn't tell you, for example, where this is set, or even if it's set in the near past or present or how time passed. At times, the writing style of this also seemed a bit overall 'whimsy' or flowery for me, and at times the prose did get a bit irritating.

The character development was ok, although at times the romance element wore a little thin. I also though Morrie often played a supplementary role to Danu, and the plot itself plodded along for far too long with not much happening. It did pick up towards the end enough to keep me intrigued enough to continue however.

This would be a good book for people who enjoy deeply poetic style writing of magical lands. Sadly, I found the writing style wasn't quite for me.

 - 3 stars

No comments:

Post a Comment