This book should have been right up my alley. A mysterious circus, lady magicians (plural! multiple lady magicians), a deadly competition, magical twins with a pack of trained kittens... 
 Unfortunately, while it did have all of the above, that's pretty much it. The Night Circus is incredibly short on actual plot. It's almost as if the competition was thrown in there when the author realized a book couldn't be all lush setting. The conflict is incredibly contrived, and as a reader, you are left with pretty much zero understanding of any of the major players' motivations. And Morgenstern starts each really short chapter with a quick time/place tag - which you actually have to pay a lot of attention to because she jumps all over the damn place. The writing is so vague and non-specific that it took me a really long time to realize things were happening out of order, but the competition moved so sluggishly slow that it actually didn't matter that events were being related out of order. And the non-conflict conflict was resolved with a bizarre mechanism that was never fully explained - much like a lot of the magic in the book, the author hand-waves all of her actual explanations by telling you that it's ~magical~. 
 Upon reading the book, one gets the feeling that Morgenstern got swept up in her admittedly fun circus, and forgot that things actually had to happen. The problem is that this reads like the bare bones outline for a novel. Instead of getting years of intense competition, we get told that Celia and Marco go through years of intense competition. Instead of an actual love story, we get told that Celia and Marco are madly in love. And so on. Even the circus, the strongest point of the book, got tiresome. As a reader, it felt like the author was trying too hard to cram WHIMSICAL! down my throat. 
 Disappointing, because this book had the potential to be something I truly loved. But it's a fast read, so not much skin off my nose.