Spoilers. 
 I've never felt so internally polarized by a book. It's some of the loveliest writing I've read in recent history; the circus itself is described in achingly beautiful detail and I've rarely wanted so much to go to a fictional place. The magic in the book is gorgeously rendered and gave me that nice, engaged but sort of floaty feeling that magic done well can give you. As the last line of the book says, "You are no longer quite certain which side of the fence is the dream." That's the way it feels, reading passages about the circus, either in Thiessen's passages or in the second-person sections, or often reading about the main characters (Bailey especially) exploring the circus. I also loved many of the people involved in the circus--Isobel is so open-hearted and lovely, the Murray twins so fun and passionate, Tsukiko such a badass. So the titular part of the novel was wonderfully executed. 
 It's the blurb part that I had real trouble with; "luxuriously romantic," "tumbling headfirst into love," etc. I started the book with high hopes for a gorgeous romance, but began to hope pretty early on that it wouldn't be between Celia and Marco--not because it was expected or cliche or a trope or whatever, bring on the tropes, but because Marco was such an unpleasant person. That's something other people think too, right? Marco is obviously a huge jerk. If it was part of the author's intent to show Marco as a damaged, lonely person and a product of a bad upbringing and for that to help explain (not excuse) his unpleasantness, it didn't come across in the text enough for me. His constant meddling with Chandresh's mind, his dismissal of the desires and feelings and lives of everyone except Celia, the direct parallels between his treatment of Isobel and Celia's father's treatment of her mother--that in particular was surely meant as a flashing warning sign, right? He turned every conversation into a reflection on himself or Celia's beauty or his relationship with Celia's beauty; especially egregious was when Celia was mourning the death of Thiessen, a dear friend she loved, and Marco's response was basically "oh he wrote you, I would have written you too except you're too great to write about." That's...not very sympathetic or kind, dude. 
 Another frustrating point was that Celia seemed to be abruptly in love with him; one minute she was unaware of him at all, the next she knew he was her opponent, the next I was praying for her not to fall in love with him, and then she didn't really fall in love with him, she just suddenly was. I can't get past the feeling that Marco was in love with Celia's looks, and Celia was in love with Marco's magical ability. I guess you could argue that they couldn't really know more about each other than those things because there wasn't much more to them, but that's...not better. 
 I really loved everything about this book except for the main love story. Which is why I'm so confused about how I felt about it, overall. It's hard to separate the rest of the book from the central thread, and I think it will be enough to keep me from rereading in the future, which is a shame.