Ebook282 pages3 hours
Carnivalesque
By Neil Jordan
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
()
About this ebook
Magical storyteller Neil Jordan steps into the realm of fantasy--for fans of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and The Watchmaker of Filigree Street.
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.
Master storyteller Neil Jordan creates his most commercial novel in years in this crackling, cinematic fantasy--which is also a parable of adolescence, how children become changelings, and how they find their own way.
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.
Master storyteller Neil Jordan creates his most commercial novel in years in this crackling, cinematic fantasy--which is also a parable of adolescence, how children become changelings, and how they find their own way.
Author
Neil Jordan
Neil Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and author based in Dublin. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He is also a former winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish PEN Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Jordan's films include Angel, the Academy Award-winning The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy.
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Reviews for Carnivalesque
Rating: 3.2 out of 5 stars
3/5
15 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A magical world that felt like a cross between The Night Circus and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. I was pulled in right from the beginning in this enchanting story with a cinematic feel. Just like certain characters in the book who experienced time in a different way, I would sit down for just a few minutes to read and before I knew it an hour or more had passed in what seemed the blink of an eye. Mythology, folklore, coming of age, and a dash of love all expertly crafted into a story that will captivate and delight. You will not look at carnivals the same way again.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A boy walks into the hall of mirrors at a carnival only to be drawn into a mirror and replaced by his reflection. Then someone pulls him out, after which he stays with the carnies, who are in fact magical beings of folklore.All of which actually makes it sound more straightforward than it probably is. Really, this is just an odd little novel. The prose is strange and dreamlike, and at some point near the end it shifts suddenly from a languid sort of fantasy to full-on horror and gets much more plotty than you'd expect for about ten minutes before it abruptly resolves all of that and moves rapidly to an end, if not exactly a conclusion. There's an interesting combination of familiar and novel elements here, and I actually did rather like the horror stuff, even if it did take me by surprise. The prose is sometimes rather pretty (even if not always as much so as it seems to think it is).But overall, honestly, it feels to me like a literary experiment that's interesting enough to be worth a look, but just never quite fully works.
Book preview
Carnivalesque - Neil Jordan
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