Devereaux Delivers New and @ Your Library: Contemporary titles to tide you over

The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Kirkus Reviews -

A stunning novel—erudite, compassionate and penetrating in its analysis of love relationships.

Eugenides focuses primarily on three characters, who all graduate from Brown in 1982. One of the pieces of this triangle is Madeleine Hanna, who finds herself somewhat embarrassed to have emerged from a "normal" household in New Jersey (though we later find out the normality of her upbringing is only relative). She becomes enamored with Leonard, a brilliant but moody student, in their Semiotics course, one of the texts being, ironically, Roland Barthes' A Lover's Discourse, which Madeleine finds disturbingly problematic in helping her figure out her own love relationship. We discover that Leonard had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder during his first year at Brown, and his struggle with mood swings throughout the novel is both titanic and tender. The third major player is Mitchell, a Religious Studies major who is also attracted to Madeleine but whose reticence she finds both disturbing and incomprehensible. On graduation day, Leonard has a breakdown and is hospitalized in a mental-health ward, and Madeleine shows her commitment by skipping the festivities and seeking him out. After graduation, Leonard and Madeleine live together when Leonard gets an internship at a biology lab on Cape Cod, and the spring after graduation they marry, when Leonard is able to get his mood swings under temporary control. Meanwhile Mitchell, who takes his major seriously, travels to India seeking a path—and briefly finds one when he volunteers to work with the dying in Calcutta. But Mitchell's road to self-discovery eventually returns him to the States—and opens another opportunity for love that complicates Madeleine's life.

Dazzling work—Eugenides continues to show that he is one of the finest of contemporary novelists.

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Kirkus Reviews –

Self-assured, entertaining debut novel that blends genres and crosses continents in quest of magic.

The world's not big enough for two wizards, as Tolkien taught us—even if that world is the shiny, modern one of the late 19th century, with its streetcars and electric lights and newfangled horseless carriages. Yet, as first-time novelist Morgenstern imagines it, two wizards there are, if likely possessed of more legerdemain than true conjuring powers, and these two are jealous of their turf. It stands to reason, the laws of the universe working thus, that their children would meet and, rather than continue the feud into a new generation, would instead fall in love. Call itRomeo and Julietfor the Gilded Age, save that Morgenstern has her eye on a different Shakespearean text,The Tempest; says a fellow called Prospero to young magician Celia of the name her mother gave her, "She should have named you Miranda...I suppose she was not clever enough to think of it." Celia is clever, however, a born magician, and eventually a big hit at the Circus of Dreams, which operates, naturally, only at night and has a slightly sinister air about it. But what would you expect of a yarn one of whose chief setting-things-into-action characters is known as "the man in the grey suit"? Morgenstern treads into Harry Potter territory, but though the chief audience for both Rowling and this tale will probably comprise ofteenage girls, there are only superficial genre similarities. True, Celia's magical powers grow, and the ordinary presto-change-o stuff gains potency—and, happily, surrealistic value. Finally, though, all the magic has deadly consequence, and it is then that the tale begins to take on the contours of a dark thriller, all told in a confident voice that is often quite poetic, as when the man in the grey suit tells us, "There's magic in that. It's in the listener, and for each and every ear it will be different, and it will affect them in ways they can never predict."

Generous in its vision and fun to read. Likely to be a big book—and, soon, a big movie, with all the franchise trimmings.