Genevieve Valentine

As a circus of performers recreated with mechanical parts treks across a chaotic world, a government man asks for the ringmaster's help in building a world of order, while two performers desire a pair of cursed magical wings.

A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

Mechanique

No one in the circus is real anymore.


3.5

Alice

Ever since I read Genevieve Valentine's 
  The Girls at the Kingfisher Club
, I had been dying to read Mechanique.

Let me tell you, it's definitely interesting. It's like an adult, steampunk version of 
  The Night Circus
 with a dark spin.

Valentine's peculiar style is here (the parentheses, bruh... I love them. They just add electricity and clearness to the story) and her prose is less sparkly (given the darkness of the story) but definitely as catching. Eery is the word to use, I think.

Plot? Um... It's very much like in The Night Circus... It's not a reaaaal plot, but something is definitely happening. Honestly, the structure is a lot like TNC's, and that's all I can say about that.

Characters? It's weird, weird, WEIRD, but I got real attached to some (if not all) of them. They're all broken (literally and metaphorically), many are ugly (again, literally and metaphorically), and some try to be despicable. But... I don't know. They aren't some of my favs ever, but I felt for them.

In short? Recommended. Trigger warnings though (view spoiler)[blood, character death )including from high fall), talks of body alteration and surgery, resuscitation, possibly more) (hide spoiler)]

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Aleena Korell

Beginning this book is like starting on a puzzle without the reference picture. Each chapter is another piece, showing just an edge of an image, a little shading or line-work that could be one thing, and in the next chapter you'll find it's something else.

It feels like prose poetry, yes. Some chapters even feel like they have stanza breaks. I don't find it distracting-- I wouldn't say I'm a huge poetry fan, but this is the type of poetry I like. The type that tells a story, bare and matter-of-fact, sparse but beautiful and full of want.

The story centers on a circus, but it's about a pair of wings. After the original owner of the wings dies, two performers join the circus who have one goal-- to earn the wings for themselves. There are other conflicts, such as war in the cities around the troupe and the lengths they'll go to retrieve their ringmaster when she is taken, but the main conflict that threads throughout the story is: who will get the wings?

I'd argue that the main character is Little George, who is the only character who gets chapters in the first person point of view. He's young and naive, but we learn about the circus as his eyes are opened to what is actually going on around him-- and what he'll be called upon to do to save the circus.

It's not told linearly. This tripped me up initially, but I grew to like it and appreciate it-- once again, the puzzle analogy, putting pieces together slowly, with no idea what they will turn out to look like. The one thing that bothered me was the author's excessive use of parentheses, when they mostly served as distractions. There was a parenthesized sentence or section on every page, at least. One was almost the entire page, parenthesized. 

This is the opposite of what The Night Circus is. Bare and desolate, gritty and grim where the Night Circus is lush and enchanting and dark. Both are beautiful. 

This wasn't what I expected but I'm glad I picked it up. Dreamlike and different, I'll keep it in the back of my head to recommend to someone looking for something not quite like anything else.

Mechanique A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti

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