🕯️ Witchling Shelf: Reading Journal

[thewitchlingshelf]

 📖 Title: The Night Circus

✍️ Author: Erin Morgenstern

🔮 First Impressions:
From the first page, it felt like stepping into a dream made of black velvet and silver thread. The prose unfurls slowly, luxuriously, like smoke curling from a candle. I expected mystery, a touch of magic, and I found both—though not always where I was looking.

✨ Mood:
Ink and fog, clockwork roses, distant music on the wind, monochrome dreams

🍵 Tea Pairing:
Earl Grey with lavender and a curl of lemon peel—old-world and just a little strange

🕯️ Spell Notes:
"The finest of pleasures are always the unexpected ones."

📚 Progress:
🖤 Started: 26 June 2025
🖤 Finished: 01 July 2025
🖤 Pages turned by candlelight: a hundred shadow-draped nights under a carousel moon

💭 Reflections:
This is a novel less about plot than presence. The Night Circus invites you into its world—the Cirque des Rêves—with its scented tents, impossible illusions, and ink-sketched rivals locked in a game neither fully understands. The atmosphere is everything here: lush, immersive, and almost hypnotic.

The romance between Celia and Marco simmers quietly beneath the surface, more like a shared fate than a traditional love story, and sometimes I wished for more immediacy, more heat to match the stakes. Likewise, the shifting timelines and perspectives were elegant, but occasionally disorienting—like losing your place in a maze made of mirrors.

But what Morgenstern does best is enchantment. You don’t so much read The Night Circus as wander through it with wide eyes, brushing your fingers along its silken edges. It lingers long after the final page, like the scent of caramel and smoke on your scarf.

Not a perfect book—but a beautiful one.