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31451203

Thanks to NetGalley and Bloomsbury USA for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: Available Now

288 Pages

Synopsis: 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 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’s might happen.

After reading the synopsis for Carnivalesque I was so excited to dive into it. I love stories about changlings and carnivals and this sounded like an entirely new take on the theme. But sadly it just didn’t live up to my expectations. The biggest problem I ran into was that I couldn’t connect with the characters. They were a little too one-dimensional and there was really no obvious development to them even by the end of the book. The story is told from the POVs of Andy and his mother, but there was little distinction between their voices which left me confused at times when the narrative switched between them. I also found that, except for a few instances, the plot moved too slowly. The world-building is beautifully descriptive, but in many ways, is too wordy and overly-descriptive. I think what frustrated me the most though, was that Carnivalesque is filled with so much potential, but it seemed to stay just out of reach…at least for me. There are reviewers, however who did enjoy this, so please check out their reviews before making up your mind as to whether you want to try this. Ana, over at Ana’s Lair enjoyed this more than I, so if you’d like to see another opinion, please read her review at https://anaslair.wordpress.com/2016/12/19/carnivalesque