My sister bought this for a friend, but made the mistake of leaving it at my house so it soon got sucked into my reading pool. It's a fantasy story in which two children are trained by mysterious magical mentors to be participants in a long-running duel. They eventually meet, fall in love, discover that they are supposed to be enemies, and attempt to escape their puppet-masters' designs.
There is a completeness of vision about this book that is very satisfying. It's like a game of chess with vivid and inventive description that brings the magical world of the Night Circus to life. A room with boxes that evoke memories, a garden made of ice blooming ice flowers, a room that consists entirely of clouds; there was something of Enid Blyton's Magic Faraway Tree about these worlds within a world – where the children would climb the tree and a new magical land would have appeared in the clouds at the top. But I think maybe therein lies my problem with this book; it didn't have enough depth or complexity, the characters seemed thin, not fully developed and I found it hard to get a sense of them as real individuals. Like chess pieces they seemed somehow inanimate except as devices to move the story on.
That said I loved the book as a physical object and found much pleasure in the fantasy world within. The storyline and characters may to me have been slight, but the beautiful imagery evoked will stay with me for a long time.