I read this over a month ago and I’m still not entirely sure how to review this book. My 4 star review is not necessarily that I had fun reading the book, but more that I enjoyed the themes of social commentary that are very exaggeratedly talked about in this book. I still don’t really know what to make of the entirety of the last chapter and I’m still somewhat confused about how much of it is actually magic/aliens or what is their collective imagination. At only 200ish pages, I really liked that I could read it in one sitting but I wish the chapters were a bit shorter to help it go a bit quicker. This is the first book I’ve read by Sayaka Murata and while I was absolutely disturbed, I look forward to reading more from this author in the future.

I fell in love with Shusterman’s writing when I read the Unwind series as a teenager. It’s taken me so long to start reading this series as I was so scared it wouldn’t live up to how much I enjoyed that series. That was me being stupid for years because this is absolute perfection, once again making you question our current society and humanity’s future. My only gripe with this book is that I think it was a bit slow to get started. It takes 150 pages before we’re actually told that either Rowan or Citra will have to glean the other, even though it’s on the blurb and I’d have thought it would happen a lot earlier. Other than that, I love the morally grey characters in this book and I always think a villain has been written well when you want to violently murder them. I’m so looking forward to reading the rest of this series hopefully during 2025.

I was in a second-hand bookshop years ago when I instantly fell in love with the red cover of this book, almost as if the secret circus itself was drawing me in. Since then it’s sat on my bookshelf and is now yet another book I wish I had read years earlier. My favourite part is easily the beautiful descriptions of the circus, costumes, and France in the 20s. I really like the use of journal entries to tell what was happening in Paris in 1925, rather than the traditional dual timeline format but I do think those entries could’ve been a bit longer rather than the story being mainly set in 2004. The main reason this drops a star for me is that I think it could’ve been a bit shorter. A pretty major event happens about 100 pages before the end but then there was quite a bit of filler between that and the climax of the book which I think didn’t need to be there. That final twist made me so emotional, and I hadn’t realised I’d even got that attached to these characters. This is the first book I’ve read by Constance Sayers, and I will definitely be reading more from her in the future.