Review: Caraval by Stephanie Garber

This book made its rounds on Booktube quite a while ago and everyone was really excited for it when it first showed up. But as people read it, I seem to recall some pretty mixed reviews. People kept comparing it to “The Night Circus” by Erin Morgenstern when it first came out, and since I didn’t really like that book, I decided this wasn’t for me. But I happened to come across it at my library, and since people had been saying that it wasn’t all that reminiscent of “The Night Circus” after all I decided to give it a go. 

This story follows Scarlett who lives with her sister and father on a small island. She is about to be married off to a count, whom she has never met, but she is happy about these prospects because it will allow her to escape her abusive father. Her sister, Donatella, however, has other plans. She snags invites to a game, Caraval, that is played every year, hosted by Legend, who appears to be a magician of some sort. When the sisters reach the place where the game takes place Scarlett finds that the stakes are higher than she ever thought and she must find her way through a confusing set of clues to get what she wants. 

I have quite mixed feelings about this book. At first I wasn’t loving it, but I kind of put that down to my prejudice against this book, because of the mixed things I’d been hearing. But as the story progressed I got really into it and found it quite a pageturner, and I was toying with the idea of giving this book 4 stars. Then the ending happened and it slipped right down to 2 stars for me. I’ll go into more details about the ending below so if you don’t want to be spoiled for it, stop reading now!!

So! The ending…oh man! I thought the aspect of the game and the sinister feeling that Legend shouldn’t be trusted was great basically throughout the book. I found most of the characters to be pretty annoying, Scarlett was such a shy little self-effacing mouse, Donatella seemed so selfish and uncaring towards her sister and Julian was just a rogue, his motives never to be trusted. But Julian and Scarlett really grew on me as the story progressed and especially Scarlett seemed to grow in confidence and agency, which I really liked. But then at the end she allows everyone else to just take charge of her life and make decisions for her, even when she really doesn’t want to do something, she is (easily) persuaded by other people. Donatella never changed in the book. She apparently does what she does so they can both escape their father, but why couldn’t she tell Scarlett about it? Why put her through that? She just seemed egotistical to me, not caring about the consequences for other people. And at one point Scarlett says “I love you” to her and she literally says “I know”……What? Who does that?! In the end I was just really disappointed with Scarlett’s choices and that fact that all her growth and newfound strength just seemed to fizz right out of her.