Felt good to get this off the perpetually growing TBR, where it has sat according to my records since 2015. So a decade later, I finally picked it up.

Ok, so this absolute brick of a book…
Has a cast of colorful (erhmm, happily monochromatic) characters. A deep deck to pull from and intertwine, which kind of happens - more like braided together, part of the story but not completely feeling connected in all aspects for the author to treat them as all main characters.

Plot- is there one? You’re there to observe and take in the circus, the labyrinth of tents and rooms that lure you in and the keepers/designers of the rooms. You jump in time and place to an endless number of locations that are wonderfully built, but ultimately feel a bit disjointed.

As for this “competition”… if that isn’t the most vague and loose definition of the word, then I don’t know what. More like forcibly entwined with no real definition of what would put one ahead, what the goals were, or even who was each’s competition. The inventors of the competition are pretty vile and cruel individuals whose extensive time on earth has robbed them of empathy and humanity more than anything else.

If you like time jumps- this book is for you. Personally, I’m often a fan of following say two timelines, but this often felt chaotic and had to constantly flip back to the beginning of the chapter to reorient myself if it came before or after a previous chapter. As such, there were long sections of dialogue that only used pronouns and I would lose track of what characters were even speaking and who else was in the room.

Strangely enough, my favorite character ended up being one of the side characters, and became much more attentive in chapters that included him.

Without saying who, I found the deaths of characters to be oddly abrupt, reading back through to make sure that’s exactly what did happen. One character you don’t even know is in the setting and another just alive one breath and gone in the next.

If we’re going to chug through 500+ pages, I would have liked a better ending.

There’s too many questions left unanswered. What happens to Marco and Celia after the fire is relit and this grand competition is left in a freaking stalemate? If Hector and A. H.’s students are left in a stalemate, how does this not backfire on them as their binders- how do they exist in any fashion? Why are the Murray twins now running the circus? How did relighting the flame draw that conclusion?

Overall: I liked it. Is it life changing? No. Would I read it again? Also no. Would I recommend it? Only to certain people and not to anyone that wants to get into reading or out of a reading slump.