by Neil Jordan
Magical storyteller Neil Jordan steps into the realm of fantasy—for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.
It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn’t. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination . . .
Andy walks into Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy’s parents. And the boy who was once Andy is pulled—literally pulled, by the hands, by a girl named Mona—into another world, a carnival world where anything might happen.
Master storyteller Neil Jordan creates his most commercial novel in years in this crackling, filmic fantasy—which is also a parable of adolescence, how children become changelings, and how they find their own way.
__________________________________________________
If someone were to ask me what the book was about I'd say it was like a dream, a dream where you see what is happening but can't change it, fantastical but plausible. In the wake of Reading Caraval and The Night Circus, this is another one of those dreamlike books that sucks you in and doesn't let go until the end and it leaves you feeling groggy as if waking up from a deep sleep.
I picked this book up for the same reason I did Caraval and The Night Circus, I have this fascination with the circus. I have never been to one and I wish I could go to one, but I might not in my lifetime so I experience it through books instead. It's like answering every runaways wish of joining the circus - it's not as simple as anyone thinks it is.
The book starts out much like the blurb describes - Andy a boy of in-determine age (but in all likelihood a teenager), was on his way to the new mall with his parents (who had their own hangups as described in the book). He sees the tops of the tents of the circus and convinced his parents to go there instead. Andy goes into Burleigh's Amazing Hall of Mirrors but was never quite the same when he got out. From there the story startd having parts that were a little confusing and way off the path of the plot but then it converges again and suddenly it makes sense.
The carnies were my favorite in this book - not quite human and they never actually had to explain themselves. They all had this desire to see what they call The Land of Spice (or the Fae Relm, or Avalon, etc) but they couldn't because they were trapped and they could only taste what it used to be before they forgot when they harvested the fronds of human emotion. I thought Andy was a regular Human changeling at first, but he is actually of the special sort of carnie.
This book is whimsical and unsettling at the same time. All in all a good read.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
No comments:
Post a Comment