The hook for me for this book was the fabulous cover, and the comparison to 'Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell' - I was anticipating a magical, wonderfully immersive story in a historical setting. To be fair, there are all the components there for an interesting story - a carnival, a boy that gets pulled through to a different place entirely via a funhouse mirror, a creepy little girl that may or may not be luring kids to the world behind the mirrors and leaving behind changelings.
Unfortunately in my opinion the writing was not good enough to support the great premise - there was confusion with many point of views/voices featured and the plot got bogged down with irrelevant asides and eventually led to a disappointing ending.

There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Oh, Carnivalesque. It's been over a year since we published and we find ourselves only typing a little review for you now.

It's curious. We had thought you would bring us some wonderful magic and a feeling of Irishness and granted, your first few chapters were lyrical enough.

We appreciated what was happening. We thought, you are our kind of book, but it turns out you're not. We don't love you like we thought we would. You're okay. You're not excellent. You are the middling kind of novel that we'd probably recommend to a friend on a good day and steer them far away from on another day.

Perhaps, in the future, we'll pick you up again and by some magic you'll get your claws in deep and we'll be hooked forever more...or maybe trapped inside your world.

Who knows.

I don't even know what happened in the first half of this book. I picked up this book about three times and I ended up getting bored at around 22%. But I knew that I had to write this review, so that meant that I had to try and get through as much of this book as possible, so I started it again and forced my way through it... And finally, I finished it, and this is my verdict.

It looked like any other carnival, but of course it wasn’t. The boy saw it from the car window, the tops of the large trailer rides over the parked trains by the railway tracks. His parents were driving towards the new mall and he was looking forward to that too, but the tracery of lights above the gloomy trains caught his imagination . . .

Andy walks into Burleigh’s Amazing Hall of Mirrors, and then he walks right into the mirror, becomes a reflection. Another boy, a boy who is not Andy, goes home with Andy’s parents. And the boy who was once Andy is pulled—literally pulled, by the hands, by a girl named Mona—into another world, a carnival world where anything might happen.

I thought I would use the hour that I had on the train to push through the novel and by the time and I come back from my trip, I had gotten to 67% - I was pretty proud of myself. And I will be 100% honest, some of it, I just had to skim read because there was just too much description that I could genuinely feel my eyes closing.

One of the things that I just really didn't like were the characters. They were flat, boring, I didn't connect with them at all and I just couldn't really care less. And that makes me so sad! Because I love connecting with characters and enjoying reading about the journeys that they go on... But alas, it just wasn't meant to be for this book.

I also thought that the carnival element wasn't very interesting which is a massive shame because well... the whole book is about a carnival, so if the actual carnival isn't interesting, then what's the point? When I got to the 67% point of the book, the carnival still didn't interest me, there were secrets that I just had no effort or motivation to find out by continuing to read Carnivalesque, but again, I knew that I had to finish it to see if the ending was all worth it.

It wasn't. It wasn't worth it at all. I spent two weeks trying to push through this book, stopping and starting and forcing myself to finish it. I turned the last page, shut the book and I just had no clue what I had just read. The ending didn't really clarify anything for me, only a couple of the secrets were revealed (but even then, they were revealed in a long-winded, confusing way). The only thing that was going through my head when I had finished the book was 'thank God that I didn't have to pay for that', because if I actually bought it myself, I would be kicking myself at how much money I would have wasted.

Like I said before though, some people really enjoyed this book and I'm jealous of that. I wish I had. Albeit, SOME of the description was beautiful and I can see where some reviewers come from when they talk about how brilliant Neil Jordan is at describing the settings, but for me, the beautiful descriptions didn't happen enough for me to bump this book up to two stars.

Personally, I really don't recommend Carnivalesque, but read it and see what you think and let me know your thoughts on it... I would love to hear what you took away from the book.

Disclaimer: this book was sent to me by the author in exchange for an honest review

I struggled with what to rate this book. On one hand it is so lush, the world within it so beautifully described and clever, on the other hand it felt sometimes so over described that I got bogged down. I adored the idea of losing yourself in a mirror and a different version of you stepping out. Someone who looks like you but isn’t you steps out as you slide in. Weirdly good.

The beginning of the novel where this takes place is just so good. Andy has been taken to the circus by his parents, he slips away and enters the weird magical world of the carnies behind the mirror, the ageless magical people who exist on a kind of mould which is scraped off the circus and placed into vials. As Andy enters the mirror another version of Andy exits, a sinister version. This Andy is cold and uncommunicative, his mum knows there is something amiss but cannot figure out what it is. Eileen, Andy’s mum was my favourite character. I desperately wanted her to get her Andy back, for things to work out for her. Meanwhile behind the mirror Andy becomes known as Dany and is embraced by the carnies and learns the job of a hauler, the person who pulls the rope for the aerialists. He also takes part in all the rituals of the circus, the magical and odd world they inhabit.

There is that same feeling that you get reading David Mitchell about this book. I wanted to love it to bits and at the beginning I thought that might be going to be the case, and while I enjoyed the experience of reading it, I felt that it could have been a little less flowery.

Thanks to Netgalley for giving me access to this book.

When Andy and his parents visit a carnival on their way to the mall, things don’t turn out quite as expected. Andy walks into a mirror in Burleigh’s Amazing Hall Of Mirrors, and becomes a reflection. He watches a boy who looks like him, but is not him, go home with his parents and finds himself a part of a magical carnival world.

I wanted to like this book. The blurb sounds so good and the cover is pretty cool, but I was really, really disappointed. Firstly, nothing much happens. The story moves very slowly and, as far as I could tell, there was no real plot. There’s just a bit of history about the carnival, Andy hanging out with the carnies and some side plot about his mum (which could have been good but ended up falling flat and feeling kind of pointless). Overall, it’s boring.

Secondly, there are far too many words. There isn’t even large amounts of description (which is a pet hate of mine), there’s just a lot of unnecessary words – whole paragraphs – which don’t add anything to the story or move the plot along at all. It was confusing and annoying and made the book drag.

Finally, there are a lot of characters who aren’t explained well enough, along with aspects (like the mildew) that I never really understood. It’s extremely possible that, by this point, I just wasn’t paying enough attention to understand properly, but it made the book more difficult to follow.

Usually I can find something good to say about a book, but in this case I really can’t. I didn’t enjoy a single part of this book, and I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is.

I'm very grateful for an advance copy of this book via NetGalley.

This was a strange book to read and review. At times I liked it a lot. At other times - especially in the final quarter - I felt I was reading a different book, still excellent but taking a different direction. It was though a rewarding and different book that took me to new places and combined the fantastic and the personal in a fresh and engaging way.

The carny world - fairgrounds, carnivals, circuses - is always a good setting for a novel: the self-containedness of the travelling show, the shifts in scene as it moves across a country, a continent, the garishness, the front, the glimpses behind the scenes. Above all the contrasts between what you're meant to see and what's really going on.

Jordan combines all this with a good dollop of creepiness: there's an ancient mystery at work in this carnival, which has become home to... let's say unusual performers, who draw with them unusual enemies. All this is told allusively, through hints and guess: even the carnies, we understand, have forgotten the details, such is their age and so scrambled have their origins become. But certain terms are avoided - and when a boy starts asking questions about them - well, he'd have been better off not.

It works really well, as we explore the carnival through the eyes of Andy, an Irish teenager who persuades his parents to stop at the carnival one day. Then he walks into the Hall of Mirrors... and comes out again. Only it's not him, not exactly. Everyone has a reflection, after all - so part of Andy remains in the carnival and part rejoins his parents. Are they two different sides of him, like Dr Jeykll and Mr Hyde? or has the mirror made a new Andy? If so, which is it - the boy in the carnival or the one who returns home?

This part of the novel works well for me as a metaphor made real - the essence of science fiction - for Andy's, Dany's growth into adolescence. This is a central theme of the book (later we meet Andy's mother surveying the teenage girls who have blossomed over a summer, reappearing in fake tan, high heels and short skirts). We see, as it were, two sides to the boy: on the one hand a sullen young man, on the other a person filed with wonder at the sights and events and mysteries of the carnival and of its performers - especially Mona the acrobat who finds him in the Hall of Mirrors. This Andy - rearranged as Dany - grows in the fertile soil of the carnival, becoming a different sort of man. Growing up. The other takes up with one of those girls, getting up ton who-knows-what in the sand dunes ands setting the rumour mills whirring. Growing up.

Flitting back and forth between the carnival and Andy's home, we see and can compare the two men/ boys, as well as learning about Andy's parents who had already grown chilly with, distant from one another. It's never clear why but there are flashbacks to their attempts to conceive and strange events around that, as well as hints of myth - Irish as well as classical. Indeed the whole book is suffused with a mythological atmosphere, drawing on Milton and abounding in symbols such as hawthorn trees, mounds, changelings and, of course, all those mirrors, which are another central theme.

In a sense the history of the carnival is a jagged, mirrored, shattered history, touching on emigration from Ireland to America, the development of the moving picture - an improvement on the mirror, surely? - and the encroachment of the modern world on the ancient. The carnival is at the centre of all this, but for how long? Whatever the origin of the carnies, they can't reproduce and in the end they succumb to the Fatigue. So they have traditionally snatched children, unwanted children from families struggling to support them, and taken them into the business, as it were. But this is now barred by modern watchfulness. And with an ancient enemy waking, how long can the carnival carry on?

All of this is gradually teased out alongside Andy's story, the picture slowly forming as though a mirror were being cleaned. Then we come to the final part of the book which suddenly shifts into something much more like horror. And that was where, I felt, the delicate way that Jordan had built his structure and slipped it into the gaps of our world, suddenly came adrift. The carnival had been painted as something elusive, something you'd come across by accident and forget afterwards. Then, suddenly, it can be tracked on the Internet, and events there take a turn that can't, surely, be forgotten - though we're not told, in the end, exactly what does happen. Indeed a crucial scene is almost completely missing: Andy plays a key role in events but, a role he seems to have been preparing for right through the book but - unless I've missed something - we never learn exactly what he does.

I debated with myself whether this actually matters. Andy's role in things is signposted and by the time we reach that point, we know what to expect of him. Isn't that enough? I couldn't decide in the end whether this is very clever of Jordan or simply annoying. Perhaps it depends what genre you think you're reading: the ending is possibly more in keeping with the early, allusive part of the book than the later parts. I'm just not sure.

Overall, then, a fascinating if rather frustrating book. Perhaps the mirror metaphor is appropriate here, too? Which is the reflection - and which the reality?

An entertaining, dream-like fantasy about a boy who is swept away with a carnival/circus after becoming trapped in a Hall of Mirrors. The writing is very whimsical, sometimes a little too much so, but the descriptions of the carnival are mesmerising. A tragic fairy tale.

Andy is just at that stage of teenage hood when you drift away from your parents when the carnival comes to his small Irish town.

Though Andy has never been quite like other boys, and he ends up visiting the carnival with his parents. But then he slips into the Hall of Mirrors without them. He is fascinated by the many selves staring back at him. Sometime later, one of those selves walks out rejoins his parents, he knows they will be leaving without him. Leaving him trapped inside the glass.

Mona, an aerial artist who seems unbound by the laws of gravity, snatches him out of the mirror and introduces him to timeless world of the carnival.

And now the two boys are in the world meaning an ancient power has been released…

This book is so far up my cul-de-sac it’s ridiculous… if you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know I’m powerfully attracted to books with carnivals or circuses in! I blame it on being part of that Cirque Du Soliel generation!

But did it deliver? Well. in most categories that is a resounding yes. But in one it’s a tragic no.

The concept and the story itself are both excellent. How the hall of mirrors came to have its power is brilliant and beautifully executed. The characters are honest and the portrayal of the feelings they all had around the normal separation of child and parent was stunningly good. It added a strong element of literary fiction that elevated the entire book.

The language in the book is beautiful, I learnt words I don’t recall hearing before but in such a way as they added to the narrative instead of interrupting it. And a few of my favourite little-used words were in there too.

So what was wrong with it?

Just one thing, I was three quarters of the way through it and I felt like I was still in the first quarter. That’s not a bad thing but it was a worry, I suddenly thought to myself ‘how on earth is this going to get to wherever it’s going with so few pages left?’ Well it got there by slipping too far into telling not showing. The climax of the story was definitely an anti-climax given that the loser of a fight to the death was announced at the start of the fight.

I’m not sure if the author lost confidence or his editors/publishers urged him to cut it short but I’d just like to say Neil Jordan, if you read this please know that you had me in the palm of your hands, you could have spun it out further, I would have happily gone along on that ride!

Still worth 4 Bites … but I know this author is capable of more!

NB I received a free copy of this book through NetGalley in return for an honest review. The BookEaters always write honest reviews.

I really wanted to love this book but I just didn't connect with it. The language was beautiful at times and the story could have been great but I felt at a remove. I didn't feel invested in the characters or what happened to them. But I can imagine other people loving it.