One of my goals in 2020 is to read more. See other books I've read or listened to here.
I’m not sure where I got this book, I vaguely think it was on a trip to VT. I’ve had The Circus in the Woods by Bill Littlefeld for many years. I picked it up several times, but I could never get into it and I could never get rid of it. Now, I’ve read it!
Molly and her little sister know that thier annual family trip to Vermont is a slice of magic. Getting to be away with thier parents and having the freedoms of a cabin community is a special time. The arts and craft leader even seems otherworldly. But when Molly finds a secret in the woods the idea of how magic Vermont totally changes.
For years, whenever I picked this book up something stopped me from reading it. Now that I have read it, I know why that was. This book was not good. The character were lacking depth, the magic in this book was lacking in depth, the writing was one dimensional. I feel that one reason for this was an older male author writing a coming of age story for a prepubescent girl. Having been a teenage girl myself, this felt very fake to me: someone writing about something that they have no personal experience with. I could see that a writer might try to step outside of their own life to write stories, but these characters were neither interesting nor compelling. I found it disappointing that some of the ideas in this book that were interesting (a circus in the woods! A magical escape!) were poorly explored and fell completely flat. I would not call this book boring, bc events did happen. Perhaps “tedious” is a better word. It didn’t take me long to read this book, but I was happy when it was over. Something I did enjoy about this book was that it made me reminisce about the Summers that I spent in VT. This is a very niche upside to this book to say the least. Unless you fit that niche, I don’t see any reason to recommend or read this book.
Have you read a bad book this year?
This review is part Saturday of my Week of Books. Check out mynew YouTube/BookTube Channel: Mad Cat Quilts for more book content (plus cats, garden, sewing, eating, asmr, etc…!). New videos on Mondays.