Intriguing premise. Starts quite well….Thankfully, it also ends well.

And let me first say: despite not finding this to be the next hailed work of gasping literary genius, this novel was an enjoyable read. I devoured it in a night. The story was a unique red rose among red roses—still a nice flower. Best of all, I can recommend it to a young person (8+, I’d say)— and that is a GARGANTUAN bonus for this reader! I love finding novels I can recommend to my nieces.

That said…

I’m glad I read all the way through, but there were moments I might have abandoned this, because that middle third was a banal ‘telling’ of a tired story that plodded along putting many clichés and trite phrases to use, recounting this-then-that and pressing stubbornly onward with this familiar plot. At times, it felt like a drag the author had to endure to get to the ‘good bits’. The grand filling of this beautifully presented nothing-sandwich was a flimsy slice of mouldy imitation meat between two chunks of warm homemade eleven-grain bread; a hiccup of grey cloud between a lightning start and a thunderous finish, the disgrace of Nick’s house in East Egg between glorious mansions…you get the idea… The core lacked substance, came off bland, a rigid report of 2-dimensional characters and some stuff that happened. It gave me a serious case of the ho-hums, as if the person writing this middle gap in the novel didn’t care much for the additional plot-serving characters of the 2nd Act.

But, I’m glad I read on, because the finale, with some predictable outcomes which made them no less satisfying, was yet to come.

Overall, this was an interesting story, but not at all about the things you expect, the exploration of things hinted at in title, synopsis, and cover, such as life aboard a circus train, the effects and treatment of a person with polio in the mid-20th CE, and though it had several elements that reflected plot and setting of The Night Circus and Water for Elephants, I wouldn’t put it in the same category as those works of art…

My Gripe with the Writing Style:
I look for beauty in writing, not just in the events of a story, because stories aren’t appealing for ‘this then that’ but for the way the reader is drawn into the turmoil and action, compelled to celebrate joys, tense and trembling in fear with the characters as they go from ‘this’ to ‘that’ along the way. Unfortunately, the writing here was only briefly beautiful—and these engaging passages were cloistered at the start and finish of the novel. For a large part, the writing was descriptive, employed too many standard adverbs and lacklustre adjectives, seldom poetic, and never absorbed me in the souls of its characters. Hear me out: if one of my students had written this (without the use of AI), I’d be over the moon. It’s an interesting story, but the execution is…amateur (in parts, reads a bit like AI). For a work requiring such grand historical investigation (and certainly shows evidence of this), spanning cultures and decades, and traversing a World War, this lacked the panache it promised. I can’t apologise for expecting more because, after all, it wasn’t written by one of my Secondary Students…

Me Being Picky:
‘He identified as’… (to promote and describe self) is a phrase I’m sure no one ever used in the last millennium. Ever. It shouldn’t have been used in this story. There were little things like this, sayings that have popped up with altered etymology in the last twenty years, and these scattered droppings tainted the historical authenticity of the novel. Parts of the story read like a strong millennial perspective on distant things of a foreign past, framed in a Canadian-bent political philosophy praising acceptance, tolerance and complete cultural appreciation as the basis of integration. These are all principles I wholeheartedly adhere to, and agree that these wonderful attitudes have been threaded into the fabric of all humanity since the beginning of time—but the woke-phrasing and PC terminology is just not as believable when it slips out the mouths of Greek circus performers, Italian shop-owners, and the working-class Englishman of 1945 in Nazi-Fascist terrorised Europe.

A Note on the Narrated Audiobook:
…speaking of Greeks and Englishmen, I know a few, and they have lovely accents that sound very different than the nondescript consistent Canadian/American accent used by the narrator throughout. Until one of the British characters goes to India, and then we get the Indian accent of a rickshaw driver. Hmm…

Harry’s five pages in India were kinda cool…