“Can’t they make their own damn show?” I say.
“Come on,” Kingston says. “Faeries are proud. The Summer King would never stoop to imitating his enemy.”
“Besides,” Mel says, “The name Cirque du Soleil was already taken.”
I’m a sucker for cinematic scenes in books. I love it when an author’s description makes me wonder just how cool something would look if it were made into a movie. The first book in the A.R. Kahler’s Cirque des Immortels series has plenty of just that sort of scene. You’ve got a circus run by Queen Mab herself, filled with shape-shifting carneys, magicians with tattoos that change position when you’re not looking, and circus trailers that open into rooms in a completely different part of the country, if they’re part of this world at all. A battle late in the book pitches two armies of otherworldly creatures against each other (naiads, dryads, satyrs, centaurs, elves, and whatever shadow-thing it is that lives under the trailers), and the whole conflict is centered around the possession of a secret demon and the lucrative trade in dreams. The book starts with a gruesome murder and ends with more secrets and lies, and I can only hope that the next two books in the series develop the characters better because the main character just hasn’t won me over at all.
It’s not that Vivienne is a bad character. She’s actually the perfect way to introduce us to the circus, since she’s only just joined the troupe at the start of the book, and she has next to no memory of her past. We get to learn along with her all the intricacies of life in a circus run by fairies and staffed with people who have made magical deals to escape whatever it was they were running from, and we don’t have to deal with a lot of Vivienne’s backstory other than “can’t remember, must have been bad, why can’t I remember?” All we really get are occasional hints of just how powerful the spell is which removed her memory, like the nicely creepy scene where Vivienne tries to do an internet search of herself.
I type my name into the search bar. Hit enter. Nothing comes up. Nothing whatsoever. Somehow, the search is completely, entirely blank. I stare at the white screen and wonder how no one in the world shares my name, how there is now trace of me out there whatsoever.
Unfortunately Vivienne isn’t consistently written. She stumbles her way through most of the first half of the book, completely unsure of herself, not really able to make friends with most of the troupe, and hopelessly in love with the handsome magician who is (of course) completely oblivious to how she feels. She also seems to be incapable of either telling him how she feels, or asking anyone if he and her best friend are dating. Then after witnessing murders and attacks and kidnappings that she’s the least equipped out of the whole troupe to deal with, she suddenly turns into Miss Bad-Ass, “Nobody fucks with my family,” and then sets off to solve the mystery and save the day. Her character development could have been done a little more gradually, but of course there’s all that time taken up with a fan-fic-like unrequited love: Does he like me? He must like my best friend…or maybe he doesn’t. But he’ll never love me. Or maybe he does, but we’ll never be together because of seeeeecrets!! Vivienne’s secret past is used in the most annoying way here. Loss of her memories was part of whatever contract she signed when she joined the circus, and yet every time, every time she learns something new about her terms of service she takes the revelation as a personal betrayal. Hey Viv? You were the one who signed the contract in the first place. Not only that, you’ve also gotten bombarded with evidence that nobody in the troupe can stand up to the ringleader. How about you dial down the moral outrage and learn to focus your energy; I think we can safely assume that whatever happens in this circus, it’s going to be Mab’s fault.
The setting and characters that A. R. Kahler has created for this series are a very clever blend of fairytale and modern life. The fact that fairy-kind would need human dreams and imagination to survive isn’t a new concept, but the idea that human dreams are a finite resource is, and having Mab gouge the Summer Court outrageously when selling them is just one of the ways she’s shown as a savvy, cutthroat character. All the flashy scenes of Mab floating over the ground or appearing ten feet tall and surrounded by thunderclouds aren’t nearly as convincing as the fact that so many members of the troupe are miserably serving unbreakable contracts with the circus, and nobody dares to even complain. Much. The hammer gets brought down on at least one person who tries to get out of their contract, and the rest of the troupe can’t do anything except watch.
I think the series would benefit from a little more editing; having a character raise an eyebrow to convey an expression is used maybe a dozen times too many, and it’s a personal nitpick of mine that if someone “hisses” their statement, then it really needs to describe a sentence that has at least one “s” in it. I think my biggest problem is that the book can’t decide if it’s young-adult or not. It’s a fun book with an interesting premise, but it would be better if Vivienne could drop the teen romance drama and grow up just a bit. Which, judging from a revelation in the final chapter, I think she’s going to have to do, fast.