I've joined goodreads! I don't suppose there's an easy way to find friends without letting it search my email or connecting to fb?

smonster, email me and I'll send my link.

Friending almost any Buffista will give you a list of the rest of us, I think. (If you click on someone's profile, you'll be able to see their friends in the righthand sidebar.)

:) that works too

Jessica, I used you as my gateway Buffista. And now I've hit my limit for friend request for the day! Whoops.

Oh, so that was you! Your e-mail address amuses me.

I finished Night Circus. The language was beautiful, but I found some of the details opaque. I get what they did in the end, and it had been neatly foreshadowed, but because I felt a bit distanced from the workings of the world I guess I just wasn't feeling the tension.

The back of the book blurb (and therefore I guess it wasn't a spoiler) said that Celia and Marco fall in love, which isn't the biggest surprise, but it doesn't really happen until halfway through a decently long book. Which left me with a feeling of inevitability, as opposed to a subtly shown inexorable step.

I didn't get a proper sense of the characters either. And the way the book jumped around in time didn't help. I found out working out how when Bailey was supposed to join the circus and when Thiessen was killed confusing enough that I had to stop reading and go back and string together the years in each chapter title.

Sadly, I could not visualise the clothing...the dresses specifically. Trying to apply the descriptions to general turn of the century styles left me all the more perplexed for having tried. Like, dude, where are all these ribbons attached, exactly?

I mean, I get the silhouette and basic frills ( [link] ), but with the amount of description allotted so many of the dresses, I felt too unsure about what I should have been seeing.

Sadly, I could not visualise the clothing...the dresses specifically.

Heh. Yeah, that was not a problem for me. And I want all of Celia's and Poppet's clothes. ALL OF THEM.

The back of the book blurb (and therefore I guess it wasn't a spoiler) said that [spoiler I didn't read because I don't read blurbs if I already know I'm reading the book, precisely because of this reason] which isn't the biggest surprise, but it doesn't really happen until halfway through a decently long book.

Ugh, I hate when blurbs do that. I'm still annoyed that the blurb for The Lovely Bones basically gives away the climax of the book.

The dresses were too vague for me. I didn't feel like she was communicating with me when she wrote things like:

a thin wisp of a gown that would likely be considered scandalous in other company, but this gathering is not easily scandalized. It is more a delicate swathe of red silk held in place by a tightly laced corset than a proper dress.

What does that mean in 1885?

And then, there were bits with technology/mechanics that I really shouldn't be worried about, because, hello...magic masquerading as tricks, but I get weirdly literal about something like these:

a white gown covered in a pattern of unassembled puzzle pieces, falling together into darkness along the hem

The gown [...], one that was [...] deemed inappropriate, the silver fabric catching the light at every touch and curve in such a way that it proved too distracting.

one in ivory satin delicately covered with black velvet fretwork

How does all that work? And what does "bound with ribbons" mean in regards to a dress of that period? I couldn't find a be-ribboned example to work from.

I know, I know. But I just had so many half-complete getups in my head,, when they were so clearly important, that I felt I was missing something.

For some reason, as opposed to giving me space in my brain to have my own version of the outfits, instead I felt like there was canon I wasn't grasping.

Also, an impatient part of my brain had a hard time accepting the central conceit of real magic that everyone thinks are tricks-- would that work now? Or is that a function of the time period of the book? Because the magic seemed *so* clearly impossible that I didn't really buy the lack of suspicion.

I hate when blurbs do that

I guess if it's in the blurb it's fair game for even a cursory review, but those all led with that too...I hate when people say "spoilers don't actually affect your enjoyment of the work". YES. THEY DO. THEY JUST DID. I'd rather have not been thinking about that except in the manner that the text revealed it. Just because *you* don't care doesn't change how *I* consume narratives.