7 Reasons to Love The Summertime Circus
The Summertime Circus
by SL Dooley
Enter a world that is full of magic and mystery...
This was a delightfully intriguing story and I mightily enjoyed it. It held me spellbound for my entire 3-hour plane flight to Washington.
Here are 7 reasons to love this story and put it high on your to-be-read pile!
1. Adult Siblings - this was something that I found refreshingly unique, in that the main character and her brother are both adults at the start of the story. Osuah (the brother) is married and his wife is expecting their first child. Isayah (the sister and main character) is the leader of the Summertime Circus, and she leans on her brother often for advice or to bounce ideas off him, as he leads one of the acts in the show.
2. Mystery - years ago, tragedy struck. Dragons attacked and the various nations suffered, but the powerful Gray Kingdom sealed themselves away instead of helping their neighbors. Why they did this is unknown, but nobody has heard from them since the attack. What happened to them? Why did they disappear? What have they been doing? Why did they refuse to help? The mystery grows as the book progresses.
3. Revenge - Isayah holds a personal grudge against the Gray Kingdom, as her younger sister was killed in the fateful dragon attack. She holds the Gray Kingdom personally responsible for all the deaths and has her own plans for taking revenge.
4. Sweet Romance - there is very little romance in the story, but what is there is sweet and adorable. Liam is the best. And that's all I'm going to say about that. But seriously, Liam is such a great character and I love him to pieces. I also loved the tiny glimpses we got to see inside Osuah's home life with his expectant wife, and while these were truly just bitty glimmers, they were no less beautiful for their small amount of page-time.
5. Grumpy Mentor - but in a way you haven't seen before! What if the grumpy mentor was also the main character? What if the grumpy mentor wasn't old? What if the grumpy mentor has good reasons for being grumpy? What if the grumpy mentor's student learns all the wrong lessons and goes haring off into danger by herself, leaving the grumpy mentor to assemble a team to go rescue them? The turning of this trope on its head is reason enough to love this story all on its own!
6. Plot twists - there are several in this story and I didn't see most of them coming, which is pretty cool. I can't say anything more about them here because: SPOILERS are kind of inherently linked to plot twists... but they're epic.
7. World-building - this world is really interesting and I would have loved to explore it for longer. I love that the author drops you into the world right at the start and just pulls you along deeper and deeper as the story progresses. I love stories like this that assume I'm intelligent enough to figure out what's going on, and this is no exception.
Bonus track - the circus itself! I want to go see this circus and I’m bummed that I can only see it in my imagination. It is full of water, fire, and air acts that all sound so magically delightful and reminded me a little bit of something one might find in Avatar: The Last Airbender (probably because of the fire/air/water powers thing).