I picked this up because I remembered loving the Night Circus, but not anything that happened in it, and I think that was to this book's benefit, to be honest. It doesn't do a lot of good to always compare one book to another.

The description on the back cover doesn't do this book any favors, either - It's sort of about Zachary and Dorian and Mirabel saving the Starless Sea, but it's also sort of about a lot of other things and about them letting it go. I think this is the kind of book that defies a blurb, though. It's very ambitious. There are several levels of book-within-a-book and where-is-the-fourth-wall going on. It's a lot, and it came together satisfactorily for me, but there is one little catch that bugged me, which is that if your characters are reading or telling stories that you yourself as the author have written and they are utterly swept away by how much they love them, that's kind of an unavoidable brag about your own writing.

I'm a big fairy tale/myth fan, and I really liked how the story about fate and time came together in the end. I also liked that Mirabel refused to let Zachary get away with everything being fate and told him he had to make his own decisions; I did kind of think Zachary's story was let down in the end - if that thread were going to carry through, he should have realized what Dorian had to do and told him to do it. Also the love story should have gotten more time and attention.

It did kind of feel like a cop-out that the allegory didn't go all the way; that time and fate didn't let themselves be called that. On the whole though, this was a beautiful read and I would recommend.