Caraval by Stephanie Garber

Caraval follows a young female named Scarlett, who has never left the tiny island where she and her beloved younger sister, Tella, live with their powerful and cruel father. For years, Scarlett has written letters to Master Legend requesting an invitation to Caraval, a mysterious traveling performance where the audience participants in the show. And for years Scarlett never received a response. But this year is different.

This year, Scarlett receives her long-dreamt-of invitation and is whisked away to the show with her sister. Only as soon as they arrive, Tella is kidnapped by Legend. It turns out that this year's Caraval revolves around Tella and whoever can find her first is the winner.

Scarlett has been told everything that happens during Caraval is only an elaborate performance. Nevertheless, she soon becomes enmeshed in a game of magic, love and heartbreak. And whether Caraval is real or not, Scarlett must find Tella before the five nights of the game are over and a dangerous domino effect of consequences will be set off, and her sister will disappear forever.

Sound interesting? I'd say it does.

I was very excited to read Caraval when I found out what it was about. But I did have a couple of issues.

For starters, I did not like the ending! For what felt like a dark-ish story it definitely did not end in a dark-ish way. While reading this I thought the ending was going to be so much better... but I was wrong. The ending, to me, was a disappointment and feel it can be improved (maybe the sequel is better).

Now just because I didn't like the ending doesn't mean I didn't like the beginning. I did enjoy the story up until the last say 50 pages. I found it to be unique, it was something I have never come across before. Something I did love about the beginning was discovering all the character relationships and where they stand with each other in the first few chapters. I felt like this laid out the character relationships for the rest of the book.

There were certain points of the writing where it was slow. I felt like the author was babbling, just writing a bunch of random stuff to make the story longer. These parts could definitely be cut out, they weren't needed and were a waste of time. But there were times where the pacing was amazing!

Overall the book was good and I did enjoy reading it.

I think I'll give it a rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Happy reading.

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