“The circus arrives without warning.
No announcements precede it, no paper notices on downtown posts and billboards, no mentions or advertisements in local newspapers. It is simply there, when yesterday it was not.
The towering tents are striped in white and black, no golds and crimsons to be seen. No color at all, save for the neighboring trees and the grass of the surrounding fields. Black-and-white stripes on grey sky; countless tents of varying shapes and sizes, with an elaborate wrought-iron fence encasing them in a colorless world. Even what little ground is visible from outside is black or white, painted or powdered, or treated with some other circus trick.
But it is not open for business. Not just yet.”So the reader is pulled into the magical world of Le Cirque des Rêves. Set in the Victorian era, a love story emerges between two competitors in a game of illusions. Each is fabulous at creating magical images. The competition turns to collaboration as each builds on the other’s work—and the circus expands. Great delightful tents appear—an ice garden that never melts, a living carousel, as each seeks to pleasure the other. The wonderful spell-bounding concoctions of Celia and Marco grow and grow. But like a garden, need their attention to stay and bloom. The dark secret is not revealed to Marco or Celia that the game ends when only one person is left standing. What will happen to the two lovers?
Many other characters emerge—Bailey, a Massachusetts farm boy who chums with the clairvoyant twins, Frederick Thiessen, clock maker extraordinaire, and Chandresh Christophe Lêfevre, the organizer behind the circus.
Slowly, practically imperceptibly, the world changes, pieces fall, the fanciful places begin to fail. The lives of everyone are at stake.
The reader is immerged in such lush and lavish descriptions that swirl around that one may miss important details. This work would benefit from being read a second time just to see how all the parts intertwine.
This feels somewhat like Harry Potter in that the author creates another world where perhaps things in the circus tents are not are they seem-- paper birds that fly, charms, and magic. The magicians work to make the illusions explainable in the Victorian world where it takes place. So that when the magician conjures impossible things, the circus audience willing accepts the show as being an illusion.
2012 ALA Best Adult Genre Fiction
