The Magic Circle

by Jenny Davidson

Three smart young women—the scholarly Ruth, her poet roommate Lucy, and their exotic, provocative neighbor Anna—are obsessed with games of all kinds. They’ve devoted themselves to both the academic study of play and the design of games based on the secret history of the neighborhood around Columbia University, from Grant’s Tomb to the former insane asylum that once stood where the campus is now. When Anna’s mysterious brother Anders gets involved and introduces live-action role-playing based on classic Greek tragedy, theory goes into practice and the stakes are raised. Told in a variety of formats—including Gchat and blog posts—that bring the fraught drama of Euripides screaming into the 21st century, The Magic Circle is an intellectual thriller like no other.

Genres: Dark Academia, Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, Contemporary, Mystery Thriller, Academia

208 pages, Paperback

First published March 26, 2013

About the author

Jenny Davidson is a professor at Columbia University and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is the author of the novel HEREDITY (2003); two YA novels, THE EXPLOSIONIST (2008) and INVISIBLE THINGS (2010); and several academic books.

Reviews

[karen · Rating 2 out of 5]

fulfilling my 2020 goal to read (at least) one book each month that was given to me as a present that i haven't yet gotten around to reading because i am an ungrateful dick.

this book had so many opportunities to earn a third star, but it staunchly refused to even try. it could have been really good, but it was written by someone who has never met a human being, and it was impossible to get past the bloviated way the characters spoke.

the first part unfolds by way of an omniscient narrator, focusing on three female postdoc columbia students: anna, ruth, and lucy, who like to drink alcohol and chat about game theory.

anna is from denmark, and described like so:

Anna was dark-haired, ringleted, slim, her spoken English precise and so little accented that only its hyper-correctness spoke to her foreign origin.

she does, indeed, speak in a very formal way. in defining the phenomenon from which the novel takes its name:

"It could be a sacred grove or just the space in which a game is played...Even an ordinary childhood game like sardines turns a house into a magic circle. The circle might be a boxing ring or a sports arena. It's just a way of talking about an amoeba-shaped space of play, one that's distinctly demarcated from the ordinary world outside. Whatever happens within the magic circle is fundamentally discontinuous with the external world.

so, sure. maybe that's how the english language sounds when it is filtered through a danish academic.

but it ain't just anna.

here's ruth talking to lucy at this casual girls night out at the bar:

"I'm sick of the way you always try to stave off confrontation."

and here's lucy:

"You two are never going to be able to make a decisive determination of the respective merits of fact and fantasy," Lucy said.

ruth again:

"I guess it's hard for me to give up the degree of control that would be entailed in allowing other people to play live parts in the game," said Ruth. "The devices are entirely within my domain. I can determine each player's experience within certain clearly defined boundaries, and players can enjoy the game on their own time and at any hour of day or night. Introducing actors risks things getting much sillier, and of course harder to coordinate."

not the most natural dialogue, but i'm willing to entertain the possibility that douchey postdocs talk like this on their downtime, but why does this also extend to the incorporeal narrator??

Anna was flagging down the waitress. Ruth hadn't yet finished her first drink, so Anna ordered a second vodka for herself and another pint of pale ale for Lucy, who was trying to keep an eye on her alcohol intake and had regretfully deemed beer's caloric overload preferable to the moral hazard of excessive whiskey consumption.

no. unacceptable. to borrow a quote from david foster wallace's Quack This Way, people, unless they're paying attention, tend to confuse fanciness with intelligence or authority.

and it never ends, this turgid word salad that believes words are good, MORE words better, MOST words best:

Though Lucy adhered to the polite fiction whereby one does not officially possess information gleaned from overhearing one side of someone else's telephone conversation, she gathered that Ruth was agreeing to meet Mark in twenty minutes for a burger at the Heights.

puh and leez. to quote dfw again, some people get the idea that maximum numbers of words, maximum amount of complication, equals intelligence and erudition. i resent having to wade through this kind of chewy-ass prose for such a basic piece of information.

in the second part, there's a shift, and ruth begins to take over the role of narrator. while the perspective is certainly different, as she is (ostensibly) a human involved in the story's events, the mode of transmission is indistinguishable from the om narr, except now we get innumerable parenthetical asides:

I might complain, but something in my hard little soul (it was Lucy who had bestowed this unflattering moniker on my immaterial substance) had melted towards Anna's game.

ruth is completely self-unaware. she observes:

"I would be honored to accompany you," said Anna, her language as always quite formal and impeccably grammatical.

this 'formal and impeccably grammatical' from someone who has just mused, on the previous page:

I had been off and on either suspicious or envious of her for months now, and the Places of Power game had in certain key respects only heightened that negative affective orientation.

'negative affective orientation?' gack.

"I will leave the two of you to have some time alone with each other," I said after the initial introductions had been performed.

BEEP BOOP BEEP BOOP I AM ROBOT

i do not understand this switch to first person in the second part, riddled as it is with unnecessary interjections. it's not constructed as a diary or any other written document—presumably this is ruth's inner monologue as she is going about the living of her life, so then why does she feel the need to include, as its own sentence: (I am only 5'3"). why is that sentence in parentheses? and to whom is she relaying this information? the reader, duh, but without ruth being given a context where she has an expectation of an audience to her private thoughts, it's just laughably clunky storytelling.

the novel's third act is structured as an account written by lucy for a third party, but in this second part, there's no indication that ruth is addressing this towards anything or -one, so why so many qualifying details tucked into parentheses bloating up these sentences?

Over dinner later that evening with Mark (I had defrosted some of the pesto I'd made that summer from the basil we grew on his balcony in pots, serving it with linguine alongside a simple green salad), he and I fell into heated argument.

where's my red pen?

Nothing like that is going to happen tonight," I said in my most soothing voice (I am a good girlfriend, really).

to whom is she appealing?

even worse is when these meaningless asides are punctuated with exclamation marks:

I just prayed (that's an idiom, not a literal use of the verb!) that the police wouldn't arrive and ask us what we were doing.

these two passages are on the same page, which i guess makes it A VERY EXCITING page!!!!!!!!!!!!!

one:

The link to my site was broken, and I dithered about whether or not it would be appropriate to leave a comment. Finally I decided that it would (it wasn't like I was criticizing what they said about me—I was just making sure that others could find the site!).

and two:

Mark still hadn't called, and gradually the life of the Trapped publicity dissipated. Finally, he texted me around eleven thirty (a call would have been more appropriate!) to suggest that we meet for dinner at Max Soha at seven.

are these !!!!! attempts to sound more human? more casual? it doesn't make any sense.

People who meet me at parties often seem surprised that a person who studies games should appear so self-contained and humorless. I usually counter this observation by saying that games are a serious business. Most players of games are very much in earnest, not so much frisking and frolicking as furthering their interests like rational actors in any other field. Games represent a field apart, that is all, not a field distinctly different in its priorities from any other. I say all of this in a relatively dry manner that leaves the person I am talking to quite unclear whether I mean to be funny or not.

(I am in fact a person with a sense of humor.)

i remain unconvinced.

what is most maddening are instances like this—a lovely ethereal paragraph of blessed clarity followed by horribly clunky dialogue.

The wine was as sweet and intense as winter itself, the winter of sugarplums and the concentrated essence of north. It brought warmth to my cheeks, and the feeling of Anna's gaze upon me also made me burn.

"You have found it difficult interacting with your mother over the years, haven't you?" she said.

"I have," I confessed. "I always seem to fall short of her exacting standards, but I am stymied as to how to change that."

one of these three characters is a poet, and i'm telling you, i would hate to read her poetry. incidentally, this author also writes YA, and i'm curious about what that reads like, but not curious enough to investigate it...yet.

part three is voiced by lucy, written as an account of events, whose dialogue is shaped as a play, complete with footnotes (hello to dfw again):

ANDERS: Old hat. Your standard role-playing game already relies on a grotesquely denatured sub-Shakespearean idiom.⁷

⁷ Anders actually talked like this.

that's some pot-kettle quality scoffing, considering this is how lucy "talks:"

We slowed down only to tip more wine down our throats; I had decanted mine into a plastic sports drink bottle, so that a sympathetic officer might countenance the fiction of legality.

i think that's enough to explain why i didn't like this book.

take all of these complaints out of it, and there's nothing much to discuss. there's no drama, the 'twist' is utterly transparent because of the heavy-handed foreshadowing, and there's just no story. it's impossible to feel anything for characters that are so wooden and robotic. as much as i love megan abbott, i have no idea what she saw in this book that made her wanna blurb it:

"The Magic Circle is elegant, brutally smart, and utterly absorbing—The Secret History as directed by Whit Stillman."

end of rant. i am grateful for the prezzie, jerri, and it WAS on my buy-for-me shelf, so it's no one's fault but my own, but this was a big old dud of a book.

come to my blog!

[Blair · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book confused me. The premise is fine - better than fine, even - but the execution left me wondering whether it had been within several miles of an editor, let alone actually received anything more than a cursory glance from one. Having bought it cheap from the Kindle store, I had to check whether it was a self-published ebook, but it seems not: in any case, it has certainly been published in a paperback edition as well. I find this quite baffling since it is riddled with odd language, unbelievable dialogue and mistakes.

Take this passage, for example:

Andrew was drinking Bushmills and Anna and Lucy vodka tonics: well drinks were two for the price of one from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m., the waitress had informed them, a pricing scheme conducive to getting quite quickly drunk. What had Lucy eaten for dinner, if anything? Toast and jam in the early evening, she supposed, but nothing that would especially soak up alcohol.

What? Where did that 'well' come from? Do 'quite' and 'especially' really need to be there? Why doesn't Lucy know what she herself had for dinner?

And this is a typical sample of someone's speech:

'The geological sweep of time always trumps the minor accretions of human latecomers. The buildings around here might not be so old, but it seems patently obvious to me that the cathedral here as effectively secures the area against occult attack as any of the great European cathedrals can possibly do in their respective cities.'

The context of this is a casual discussion between friends, not a lecture or something, and they're even supposed to be a bit drunk! I'm sorry but I just cannot believe that anyone would actually speak like this, no matter how intelligent or academically minded they were supposed to be.

I know this seems like I'm really nitpicking, but imagine the above examples being repeated throughout an entire book and you might have an idea of how frustrated I got with the thing. The story is okay - it centres on three young women, teachers who live in the same apartment building, who become entangled with a series of live-action roleplaying games which start to impact on their personal lives and relationships. This idea has the potential to be really interesting, but I was constantly distracted by stilted speech and weird phrasing. I also found it extremely difficult to tell the three main characters apart, despite the fact that I think they were all supposed to have really distinctive characteristics. A case of good concept, poor execution - in this respect it reminded me of The Whole World, which I had very similar issues with - and I can't recommend it.

[Kelly · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Magic Circle by Jenny Davidson is the story of three young women in academia, all of whom become involved in a particular type of game that combines urban exploration with LARPing (live-action role-playing). Logical Ruth is primarily interested in games as teaching tools. Anna, a more right-brained sort, prefers visceral games that effect a psychological transformation on their players. Their more reserved friend Lucy is along for the ride. The novel is primarily narrated by Ruth and Lucy, with occasional Internet posts from Anna interspersed.

The novel begins slowly — as it needs to. Davidson takes time to explain to the reader what the characters mean by “games” and how they work. This material is sometimes related in a dry style (including in the dialogue), yet I found it interesting. Meanwhile, she’s also fleshing out the three women and the emotional issues they bring to the table. It was clear that this would be one of those novels where there’s a deep dark secret and eventual violence, and curiosity and tension began to build in me as I read all this set-up. What would the secret be, and in what terrible way would it affect the friends? As I said, the beginning is slow, but it needs to be, and I enjoyed it.

There is a slight time jump at just over the halfway point, and this is where the problems begin. Lucy has gone home for several weeks to deal with a family emergency. Anna’s brother Anders has arrived on the scene, and he and Ruth have begun a relationship. Yet this happens almost entirely off the page, and we see most of this relationship’s development through the eyes of Lucy, who arrives in medias res and narrates it from her outsider’s perspective. This is a valuable perspective, but because we don’t get much of anyone else’s point of view, the appeal of Anders doesn’t come through to the reader, and so it’s hard to understand the trouble he causes.

After this point, the rest of the plot whips past at breakneck speed. There’s a moment when you realize there’s not enough book left for everything Davidson needs to put in it. She hits the requisite plot points for a dark-secrets-erupting-into-violence plot, yes, but so rapidly and with so little emotional buildup that their appearance seems perfunctory, as if she is running down a bulleted list.

Also not developed enough is the bacchanalian aspect to the story. At Lucy’s suggestion, the group begins developing a game based on Euripides’ The Bacchae. This game leads to very real bacchanalia as the various players get deeply into their roles. There is ample opportunity here for scenes of heady sensuality that could have shown the reader why the players are so seduced. But all of this is told from the point of view of Lucy, who is both embarrassed by what’s going on and intentionally trying to be succinct because she’s making a statement to the police. The only time these scenes’ Dionysian power really comes through is in scenes where the players’ dialogue is included (such as chanting, or arguments with the opposing side) — that is, when the plot briefly breaks out of its frame story. Davidson has limited her novel too much with the distancing techniques she uses to tell it.

I’ve read comparisons of The Magic Circle to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a novel I haven’t read but have always meant to. For my part, based on the plot synopsis, I went into The Magic Circle hoping for a blend of Carol Goodman’s The Lake of Dead Languages and Elizabeth Hand’s Black Light. As it turns out, while neither of those novels is flawless, both are far more immersive than The Magic Circle. I recommend them instead: the former for dark secrets and some ancient Greek allusions, and the latter for trippy bacchanalia.

www.fantasyliterature.com

[Abigail Haze · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only thing the author seems to enjoy more than jerking off to her overuse of SAT vocab words is fruit jam.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 2 out of 5]

To begin with, this book is not aimed at me. I'm an old white guy from Northern California, and the protagonists are New York academic females in their late 20s and early 30s, so my rating is obviously affected by that gap.

Still, "The Magic Circle" (New Harvest, $15,95, 196 pages) has flaws that make it hard to recommend even for a grad student at Columbia.

First, the three protagonists each have issues: One is close to being an alcoholic, another has eating issues and the third is a cutter. None of the three is particularly compelling, nor were they sympathetic enough to really root for.

Second, the plot is both slow-moving and predictable. It's pretty obvious where everything is going early on, and there are few surprises along the way that make the inevitability palatable.

Finally, the dialog. Here's a sample (one of many): "There's not much point in expanding the game ... until you've established a suitable array of technological and ludic mechanisms for a smaller footprint. The idea of the asylum nicely focuses the game's interest."

Granted, I don't live the rarefied air of author Jenny Davidson, an English professor at Columbia, but do people really talk like that? And if they do, do I want to spend 196 pages with them?

My answer is no, but maybe there's an audience out there that will say "yes" -- but I'm guessing it's not very big.

[Korey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was clumsily written in some respects but I still liked it. The author hasn't found a way to integrate exposition into the narrative unobtrusively and parts of the text and character dialogue have this awkward, overly formalized quality to them that doesn't feel authentic. I also thought there were a few pacing issues. The story itself was pretty cool though, and while their integration into the story was hardly seamless I found the info dumps pretty interesting. I am a former role player and a current graduate student so I am pretty familiar with and interested in the dynamics of both worlds. There is real creativity here and the book is a super page turner despite the problems in the execution.

[Lilia Ford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating. I read the book in one sitting and couldn’t put it down—(in fact I skipped dinner because I was so immersed, which is thematically quite appropriate). It’s a many-layered, thought-provoking book. I have a lot of familiarity with the world portrayed, since I have been to grad school and have lived Morningside Heights for most of my adult life. The attention to the detail here is marvelous—odd word choice I know since the depiction of the setting is so reality-based and accurate, but the effect is amazing. Books that get New York right are quite rare, and when they fail they tend to hit notes of agonizing phoniness—this book is a great model for anyone who wants to use New York as a setting: the first rule is that New York is above all a city of neighborhoods.

Davidson shows how to do it well, but the point is more than for the sake of mere accuracy. It so ups the realism of the characterization to have the players so grounded in a real space—there’s a specificity in their concerns and routines that is simply lacking in most books. Obviously, that extreme realism takes on extra significance given the characters’ fixation on games. The fact that they use that setting as both the scene and even the point of the games adds yet another dimension. Games are work for two of the characters, and that inherent tension sets up a lot of what happens in the end: specifically, what happens when you try to turn your place of work and residence, with all the ordinary concerns of getting mail or meeting a friend for coffee, into a kind of lunatic, psychedelic playroom?

I found the material on games fascinating, and there I knew almost nothing to start with. Though the characters clearly think like the academics they are, Lucy is an effective stand in for the reader in knowing little about games and having a bracingly skeptical reaction to the more pretentious flights of her friends. I found Lucy to be an especially present character. One effect of reading the book is that by the end, she seems to occupy your brain like someone you’ve actually met—again I speak advisedly. Thanks to the shifts in narrative mode, Lucy feels like someone you’ve met in reality, with the same kinds of gaps in knowledge you might have with an actual friend or roommate, and emphatically not the kind of intimate comprehensiveness with which you know most fictional characters. The effect with Ruth is very similar. There are enough details to tell you an awful lot about her, and though she does feel a bit Whit Stillmanesque, the portrayal is accurate for the same reason Stillman’s are, because she is the product of a particular culture.

The only place I felt it wasn’t enough was with Anders and to a lesser degree Anna. I loved the character of Anna, with all her exotic glamor and the scenes with her ‘places of power’ game were among my favorites in the book. But we are mostly given tantalizing hints and few facts about her story— the gaps in knowledge there are realistic, but also frustrating. Anders is too shadowy for the impact he has, and the ending felt very rushed. I think ultimately the author’s choices can be justified, but they are unconventional and to a degree alienating. They force the reader to do a lot more work than usual to figure out what happens and why.

Still, it did not spoil my enjoyment of the book at all. I would have read it for the gaming alone, which was utterly fascinating and brilliant—or the portrayal of New York City that was among the best I’ve encountered.

[Kiki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Steer clear of this novel. I don't even know what kind of genre novel this is, other than terrible. It's certainly not a thriller and not psychological in any meaningful sense to the reader. An incomplete plot, badly executed. Has the feeling of an English Lit student, wanna-be author trying desperately too hard but without the talent to back it up. Tortuous to read with ridiculous self-indulgent over-intellectualised language, irritating and one-dimensional characters who proclaimed to be so much more complex - and what's with the over-use of footnotes?! Just doesn't work in this age of e-readers. Had to force myself to read through to the end - an ending that was anti-climatic, highly predictable and probably thrown together; the author probably had no clue how to finish this book that she'd (attempted) to build up dramatically. Would not recommend this and will not read another of her books.

[Chris · Rating 2 out of 5]

The plot description for The Magic Circle sounded right up my alley. The story centers around the academic and social world of Columbia University, specifically Morningside Heights. We are introduced to graduate student Ruth whose realm of studies are specifically focused to the science and nature of play and the design of games on a scale that goes beyond the kitchen table. At the start of the book, Ruth is finalizing her design of an immersive interactive gameplay experience around New York City centered on the history and intrigue of an insane asylum. The book extends from this initial premise and has Ruth team up with her roommate Lucy (also a graduate student at Columbia) and their "exotic" and "provocative" neighbor Anna (a wild and eccentric foreigner living in New York). Together the group plans to create a new fully immersive live-action-role-play game based on an ancient Greek play. The synopsis continues by alluding to dangerous and reckless raising of the stakes that will bring the tragedy from role-play to reality.

All in all, this definitely sounded like something I would enjoy. I have participated fairly minimally in a few "alternate reality games." These games generally begin with an Internet presence and take on a role-playing aspect but then expand into the real world to continue the story and the gameplay often with real world aspects including phone calls, letters, interactive hunts around certain locations and more. I enjoy games and game theory as a whole and I really love it when things get more immersive. I was really looking forward to this book.

The book starts out with numerous interactions between the characters focused on the development and delivery of Ruth's game. There are a lot of discussions around game theory, game design and what makes for a good game experience. The three main characters (Ruth, Lucy and Anna) each have their own general opinions and make valid points. This first section of the book is fairly low on any real action but serves to present a framework about the concepts of gaming in the real world. I found the discussions rather interesting but felt like they were somewhat oddly placed especially when things became overly academic or very detailed.

I personally enjoy reading and studying game theory but to a reader looking for intriguing plot, I fear that these first few chapters would have been a bit boring at times. A lot of the information presented does help flesh out the characters and it definitely gives the reader a sense about the world of real-world role-playing but a lot of the details could likely have been saved for a thesis on game design rather than a fictional narrative. What felt even more strange to me was that there was so much focus on building up this particular game and then the rest of the book had very little mention of this game at all. I guess it shows that time marches on, but after all the build up I really wanted to see some people play Ruth's game. I was initially confused since I knew from the synopsis that "the game" in the book plot was based on a Greek Tragedy and this game was not. I thought perhaps they would modify this existing game. But instead, this game is almost wholly abandoned and forgotten as the book progresses.

About a third of the way into the book, we have a rather unexpected shift. Lucy receives a phone call about a family issue that requires her attention. She hopes she'll be gone for only a couple of days but ends up being gone for weeks/months. As she receives the news and prepares to go, we learn a little bit about both Lucy and Ruth (who helps Lucy prep to leave and helps square away her classes for while she's gone).

At this point, the book suddenly transitioned from third person to first person. I found this very disorienting especially since I didn't feel a distinctive change in narrative voice and as such it took a little digging for me to figure out exactly who the narrator was. I knew (or assumed) it had to be Lucy, Ruth or Anna (and I quickly ruled out Anna) but it really wasn't clear initially who was narrating. And honestly, it didn't make a huge difference who was narrating except to try and determine who "I" was. Even when I did figure out who was speaking, I couldn't fathom the justification for moving to first person. This further confused me many chapters later when the book transitioned yet again. It stayed in first person but moved to yet another narrator. The multiple transitions were definitely disorienting and I really felt like they were unnecessary. The one aspect that the first person does provide is that the first person narrator is speaking in retrospect. She has already seen the events of the novel play out and as such, she occasionally makes comments that directly foreshadow the tragedy to com. I don't think the transition to first person hurts the plot but I also don't think added enough substance to the story to make it worth the jarring change.

Once we are in first person mode, we learn that Anna's brother Anders has arrived in New York and that he and Ruth are now romantically involved. Coincidentally, Anders is also very interested in live-action-role-playing and Lucy returns to the scene to find that Ruth, Anna and Anders are working on a large scale live-action-role-play based on a Greek tragedy. Lucy is reluctantly drawn into planning the game and she quickly comes on board and becomes a very enthusiastic participant.

Very basically, the Greek play they are basing their game on involves the conflict between the "eat, drink and be merry" crowd and the "sober, chaste and righteous" crowd. We hear and see most of the narrative through the view of the riotous partiers and end up in a den of drunken orgies and craziness (fortunately without any real descriptive segments…though there was one scene that, while not graphic, was more shocking than I expected). The game involves the tension between these two groups and the inevitable clash that's going to happen. Throughout the game there were hints of things being taken too far and stakes going too high (as promised in the synopsis) but most of these events happen "off stage" and have only peripheral impact on the plot. {WARNING: SPOILER} In fact, the final conflict/tragedy of the book ends up being more due to incestuous sibling rivalry and a lover's quarrel rather than due to anything that happened in the game. {END SPOILER}

TO SUM UP

First, the bad.

Even though I liked the game theory segments, I felt like they were far too academic for a fictional narrative, especially one that was trying to be an action thriller of sorts. The discussions were interesting to me but I felt like they got too detailed and would come off as long-winded to a reader less interested in the subject.

While I enjoyed the smattering of details and descriptions throughout the book, I felt like there were many cases where there was a lot of description or detail just for the sake of trying to flesh things out. The details were good and well described. The characteristics were interesting. But they felt out of place and didn't add anything substantial to the story. For example, we have great detail about one of the character's dealing with an eating disorder. This goes on for multiple pages in great depth. But the eating disorder has no impact on the story and, while interesting, doesn't effect the character of this person in a way that suggests it's important to the plot other than to suggest that she's had to work through some personal demons. We have other scenes which similarly describe random objects, areas or characteristics. While the language of these descriptions is fluid and very nice, these additions didn't seem to add to the story and in some ways felt out of place.

In a similar vein, I felt like the dialog was sometimes very stilted. I will grant that Ruth and Lucy are graduate students and are very academically minded. But a lot of their conversations felt overly academic and formal. As a result, they didn't often feel very natural. They maintained the heightened language even when just lounging around their apartment or at a bar and not specifically talking about the science of games or some historical lesson. I wasn't hoping for a lot of slang or anything, just for conversation that sounded more like people talking naturally to each other rather than trying to write a proposal. I have known some graduate students who can get into the "stilted" conversational style when they are talking about a subject they're passionate about. But their language doesn't remain academically stilted once they return to "normal" conversations (where to eat or exercise or other mundane things).

Also related to the characters, I found their behavior and attitudes to be a little juvenile in contrast to their academic attitudes and vocabulary. I suppose these characters are plausible but they felt like a paradox of traits. On the one hand they seemed very smart and thoughtful. They were creative and adventurous but also had the careful and meticulous nature of thinking things through. On the flip side, these same characters seemed to really "let their hair down" (though not their conversational vocal) and act like a bunch of immature college freshmen. I had a hard time putting my finger on their true nature. The book seems to place them in their early to mid thirties but I had a hard time even seeing them as being in their 20s at some points. They just seemed to have not learned any good life lessons that would have matured them…which seems paradoxical for graduate students in New York City. :)

Lastly in my "bad" critiques, I have some problems with the overall plot and story arc of the book. I felt like there was a lot of promise and some good intrigue being built up. I think part of the problem came from the issue I mentioned above with all the extra detail that didn't add to the plot.

There were so many superfluous details floating around that it wasn't clear what the real conflict was going to be. These details didn't act like red herring "clues" in a mystery novel. Rather they were presented in a way that made them feel vitally important to the story. This would be fine if they continued to be present to suggest they might have importance even though they were red herrings. Instead, these various elements (such as the eating disorder) make a very prevalent appearance and then vanish completely.

Beyond the extra details that didn't play out, the overall conflict/tragedy of the story ended up extraneous to the game itself. While the game provided an interesting surrounding for the events of the story, the promise of the synopsis was that the game would provide the motivation and action for the events of the story and this was not the case. Frankly, the end conflict/tragedy could have happened just throughout the act of the friends writing their graduate thesis and getting stressed out near the end of things. The climax of the book is only related to the game in that it took place at a game setting. But the details of the climax could have happened outside of the game world. I think there was the potential for the climactic conflict to have been more related to the gameplay and perhaps that is the intent. But for me as a reader, the connection was a weak one and fairly unclear.


Now, the good.

Being a fan of games and game theory, I really enjoyed the discussions around gaming, play and entertainment. The information seemed to be well researched and very informative. I enjoyed the descriptions of New York and Morningside Heights. I appreciate the literary experimentation of changing points of view from third person to first person to yet another third person (I enjoyed the experiment…I don't think it ended up working out as well as hoped).

I enjoyed learning about the games that were developed and seeing the fun details that were played out. I especially enjoyed seeing the various character reactions to the crazy aspects of live-action-role-play. I thought the story had a lot of promise and was pretty interesting.

Even though, as I mentioned above, I don't feel like the end conflict/climax of the book was directly related to the live-action-role-playing, it did present an interesting story.


OVERALL

Overall, I felt like this book had a lot of promise that ended up undelivered. I feel like I've talked this book down quite a bit and I feel a little bad about that. I went in expecting a fun and exciting bit of tragedy within a live-action-role-play and ended up with a lot of confusing extraneous details, some wild and crazy gameplay and a lot of action that happened outside of the game. I kept seeing glimpses of in-game activities that would have fulfilled the promise and I kept hoping they would take center stage and then explode into conflict. Instead, we ended up with a strange soap opera with some smart self-involved people. I enjoyed the intrigue generally and I had fun with some of the science/theory and with some of the literary experimentation (changing tenses, etc). I feel like the story was alright generally but I had hoped for more and felt like it needed to be tightened up a bit to fulfill on my expectations.

***
2.5 out of 5 stars

[Athira (Reading on a Rainy Day) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ruth, Anna and Lucy are three young women studying/teaching at Columbia University. They are quite addicted to games and the theories of games and enjoy spending long hours talking about various aspects of game-making. At the beginning of this book, they are working on a game that's Ruth's brainchild. The idea of the game is to provide a virtual experience of a mental institution that used to be located exactly where one of the current Columbia University buildings is situated. While that's happening, Anna comes up with her own idea of a game which involves some occult-like rituals in front of several supporters. But when Anna's brother Anders becomes involved, things begin to go wrong terribly.

I gave up on this book. I don't typically review DNF books unless I have something to say, which in this case is a lot. I actually gave this book a lot more tries than I usually would with a book that's not piquing my interest. At many points during my reading experience, I wanted to put it down but since I was reading it for the tour, I kept going back to it.

The Magic Circle has quite a few elements I like - gaming, a university setting, women characters, nerdiness and psychological issues. It starts off demonstrating the women's strong interest in games and their plans for Ruth's gaming project. Unfortunately, that's all I enjoyed about this book.

The characters didn't feel well-built to me. And that's sad because there was so much potential here. I found the three protagonists acting out of character too often. They are portrayed as very good friends and then suddenly, they act way too formal in their conversations.

I didn't feel there was a proper build-up of essential plot points. For instance, one character has been suffering from eating disorders for a good part of her life but that isn't mentioned until page 88. After that though, it is brought up in every other paragraph - almost as if all the relevant facts need to be revealed. There was also a very weird ritual described in the book - too weird it made it very implausible. I got bugged by the long trivial conversations and the descriptions of several minor events in the book. Maybe they were all meant to be significant later in the book and if I had been more patient, I may have discovered them but the build-up wasn't great and I couldn't quite understand why a character often made a mountain out of a molehill. It made me wonder too much about whether I was missing the overall picture.

The author definitely writes beautiful sentences but the sentences didn't gel well when put together. I found the whole narration very dry - with its long-winded sentences and heavy usage of uncommonly used English words. I almost got the impression that a lot of the big words were used more for impressing the reader than to impart any purpose.

Overall, I'm disappointed. Maybe I wasn't the right audience though from the synopsis, I would have jumped for this kind of book any number of times. The whole execution of it just was too poor and even though The Magic Circle is under 200 pages, I couldn't quite put myself through the second half of the book. Nothing of any significance had happened when I put the book down, which made me not miss it. I wish I could say something more redeeming about this book and since I'm the first reader on the tour to review this book (and there doesn't seem to be anyone in bloglandia who have read this book), I'm not able to point you towards other reviews. Hopefully, others would have enjoyed it more than me.

[Samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Summary from Goodreads:

"Three smart young women—the scholarly Ruth, her poet roommate Lucy, and their exotic, provocative neighbor Anna—are obsessed with games of all kinds. They’ve devoted themselves to both the academic study of play and the design of games based on the secret history of the neighborhood around Columbia University, from Grant’s Tomb to the former insane asylum that once stood where the campus is now. When Anna’s mysterious brother Anders gets involved and introduces live-action role-playing based on classic Greek tragedy, theory goes into practice and the stakes are raised. Told in a variety of formats—including Gchat and blog posts—that bring the fraught drama of Euripides screaming into the 21st century, The Magic Circle is an intellectual thriller like no other."

My Thoughts:

The Magic Circle was one of those books that is hard to define for me. It started off slowly for me in the beginning because I didn't really connect with any of the characters. But by the second part of the book I was truly hooked and had to see how everything was going to end. The author focused much of this book around gaming and all different kinds of aspects related to gaming. Seeing as I have a ten year old that LOVES to play games of all kinds, I definitely could relate to that aspect. I just had a really hard time connecting to the characters. I liked Lucy the most and I thought that the author did a really good job of making her come across realistically. But I didn't care for Ruth at all for various different reasons and I especially didn't care for her after reading the portion that was narrated by her. She just seemed to rub me the wrong way. Anna on the other hand was a constant mystery to me which was intriguing....I never ever knew what to expect from her. I liked that and I wanted to learn more about her. I also liked the fact that we never quite knew if we could trust Anna and her motivations. Was she telling the truth? Or was she the person that her brother painted her out to be? The book does start off slowly but it picks up steam after Anna's brother Anders comes into the picture. I could just tell that there wasn't going to be a happy ending by then, but even I was surprised at the end. The author left a lot to question and think about when the book was finished but she did it in a way that I was actually okay with. I wanted more but I wasn't disappointed that it wasn't there. This was a haunting read that left me thinking about it long after I finished.

Overall, it was an okay read for me bordering on good. There were things I enjoyed and there were things I didn't like. I'm a HUGE character person so my biggest issue was that I couldn't connect with the characters. But sometimes you are going to have that and I don't know that the author meant for us to really connect with any of them. I liked the mysterious ending that gave closure without tying everything up. It left me wondering and wanting more. I think that I would read more books by this author in the future based purely on the second half of the book which was quite gripping. Recommended but with a few hesitations.

Bottom Line: A good read but one that never fully captured me.

Disclosure: I received a copy of this book from the publisher as part of a TLC book tour. The thoughts are my own.

[Marlene · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally published at Reading Reality

Live action role-playing, otherwise known as LARPing, is normally the sort of geeky fun that adults, or quasi-adults, play at science fiction conventions. Another frame of reference for the average person might be teenage boys playing Dungeons and Dragons and going several stages too far.

In Jenny Davidson's The Magic Circle the only part of either of those frames of reference that remotely applies is the bit about going several stages too far. That certainly happens.

Most of us don't even know that game-playing is an academic field of study. Getting a degree in "ludology" seems vaguely ludicrous to most people, no matter how much we might enjoy playing games ourselves.

In The Magic Circle, Ruth and Anna are both game designers in pursuit of their Ph.D.'s. Lucy, Ruth's roommate, is working on her MFA in Creative Writing. They live in the "magic circle" of academic life, and Ruth and Anna create other "magic circles" in their games.

A "magic circle" in this instance is a game environment. The board a game is played on, the table around which the players play a card game, or the place where LARPers live out their fantasy game.

Academia definitely has aspects of a game environment. The difference is that the stakes in the academic game of degrees, jobs, committees, publishing and tenure are real.

In a LARP, the game blends into the real. It is, after all, a LIVE-action role-playing game. Anna and Ruth are playing a game with each other, only Ruth doesn't know it's a game, a competition to see who can create the more immersive game.

When Anna's brother Anders sweeps in and upsets all the players on the board, the stakes become very real, and permanently life-altering.

Escape Rating B+: The Magic Circle reminds me of the phrase about the riddle wrapped in the enigma. There's the big game that Anna and Ruth create based on the Greek tragedy The Bacchae. It's wild and liberating and incredibly immersive, until the game becomes all too real.

It's a bad idea to base a game on a tragedy. The gods still do not like to be mocked.

But there are also games within games, like wheels within wheels, and those are what keep the story moving forward. Who are Anna and Anders? What game are they playing with each other, and with Ruth and Lucy? Is any of what Anna and Ruth and Lucy have experienced together real? Or was it a game all along?

I still have unanswered questions about this story. But that's the way this one is supposed to end. It's not a neat and tidy book. It's not meant to have a happy ending. This one is meant to shake you up, and haunt you. It definitely did its job on me.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Magic Circle It's difficult for me to pinpoint exactly how I feel about The Magic Circle, but I can absolutely tell you that this is a very different kind of read. Meshing together history and gaming with the concept of human nature, I was definitely not expecting what I found between these pages. This might sound like your normal mystery or thriller book. I can assure you, however, that it is not.
 
The Magic Circle starts out very deliberately by explaining to readers, through dialogue mostly, what it means to "game" and how this will affect the characters in the writing to come. It was a little tough for me to push through the first fifty pages or so. Jenny Davidson does a nice job of introducing the main players in this story, but it is almost buried under the amount on information that is offered up at the same time. I didn't really feel that I was able to meet Ruth, Lucy and Anna until much later.
 
Which brings me to my biggest issue with these women, actually. I understood that they were graduate students. I understood that they were intellectuals. However the dialogue and the way that they interact all seemed so stilted to me. I'm a well read person. I enjoy deep and thought provoking reads. Yet I had no idea that there would be such a dense amount of vocabulary in their conversations. It was almost as if their copious drinking was thrown in just to show they were college students.
 
Once the book does take off, essentially once Anders enters the scene, it becomes much easier to follow along with Davidson's characters. The mystery aspect is there, mixed in with the concept of showing dark desires we all possess. By the time I was at the end, I was much more invested in the book. I raged when I realized that the book was nearing its end, and I likely wouldn't have all of my questions answered.
 
The Magic Circle was a bit of a roller coaster ride for this reader. There were parts I pushed through, others I devoured, and at the end I couldn't quite decide how I felt. I honestly still can't. What I can say is that this is a different read, and worth a read if for no other reason than that. Go into this with an open mind and you might just find a new read to love.

[Ally (AllyEmReads)]

DNF at 40%

I tried so hard. I really did. I wanted to like this book because it’s shelved as dark academia which is one of my preferred genres. And the premise sounded right up my alley: three college grads are working to create an interactive game when they get caught up in another that brings Euripides’ tragedies to life. Game theory and Greek history?? Uhm, yes! Sign me up!

But...

The execution was atrocious, if I am being completely honest. The part about game theory were interesting, I’ll give it that, but the whole book was just...info dumpy exposition. Like, there was an entire page on what one of the characters was getting from the store. It was ridiculous. Not to mention, I was nearly half-way through, and we hadn’t gotten ANY of the Greek interaction. I was waiting and waiting for it to come, but it never did!

Really I should have looked at the ratings on here before I added it to my wishlist. Next time I see a dark academia book, or any book really, I’ll take a closer look at the reviews before making a decision to read it or not. At least I learned my lesson, even if it was the hard way.

[Katherine Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is an interesting one. The language is pretentious and at some times haughty but then the main characters are all college students pursuing their master degrees so some of that is to be expected. The book has three segments whereas the middle bit is told by a different character which at first is distracting. Though I think the story is interesting it is also disjointed. The author puts out a lot of hints and tidbits that make you want to know more but never follows up on them. Lastly the sociopathic tendencies that become the primary point of the story in the last section really leave one questioning what the entire point of the story truly was. Though powerful and engrossing in many parts, I found myself wondering why I just read it and questioning if it was really worth my time. Ultimately the best thing I can say is the writing style and execution is very much an act of literary masturbation providing minutes of excitement and spent energy here and there but lacking the satisfying cigarette after the final pages.

[Caite · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although Davidson's idea had a lot of promise, the execution was lacking. She bit off more than she could chew and proceeded to write an over-intellectualized story that should not have been as long or as unclear as it was. The third section was readable, and I would have enjoyed the rest of the book much more if it had all been in that voice. That being said, the story ended with too many loose ends and questions that went unanswered by the author. Also , how many diagnoses and unnecessary deaths did she need to force into one story?

[Bradford · Rating 2 out of 5]

I would give this book 1 star, but I recognize that my inability to connect with the characters on any level whatsoever is related to my gender. I still wouldn't recommend this book to my girlfriend though. The language is obscenely academic (yes, yes, the characters are academic. Still, this reads like a manuscript). The plot is paper thin and hugely unsatisfying. The concepts I did find interesting, I thought were left far too open at the end. (The final altercation, the nature of... well, all of the games...)

[Carrie Ardoin · Rating 1 out of 5]

I made it through 80 ish pages of this book and that way more than enough. I consider myself a well read girl, but I considered using a dictionary for some of the vocabulary this author was using. I just felt it was trying too hard. Also, all three main characters are basically the worst, most pretentious an NYC grad student could be. The novel was going nowhere so I am done reading.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

I didn't care for this much, but I admire Jenny Davidson for writing and publishing her novel. She's an academic and critic, and this seemed to be something she wrote for fun - an homage to her favorite genres set within the Columbia University setting she knows well.

[Beth · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very, very odd book. I had a like/dislike relationship with it. Hard to describe it.

[Sarah-Hope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting in what it does, but disturbing without any payoff to balance that feeling.

[Jos M · Rating 3 out of 5]

This seemed to be a mixture of things I like a lot: cerebral, academic young people driven mad by their repressed desires; lengthy anthropological digressions about the nature of game-playing as a cultural phenonoma; juicy thriller; geo-locational app based gaming; re-interpretation of The Bacchae -- you know, cool stuff like that. Unfortunately, it's less than the sum of its parts for me for me. I think, like a lot of similar content, this suffers by comparison with The Secret History.

The first section, in second person, I found a little odd and stilted. The language is academic and formal, and we get more of that with the first person narratives later, but considering our narrators are academic, formal people, I have no issue with that. I was interested in some of the things the characters were doing -- Ruth's game design in particular. But, I had a hard time distinguishing the characters. The characters come into sharper focus later, when Anna steals the lipstick -- but man, having a SUPER CRAZY WOMAN steal a lipstick to show how UNHINGED and SEXXXXY she is just such a massive cliche, hey? That's something I've seen and read ten-thousand ways before. We get it, here is someone who breaks down boundaries -- show it in a more interesting way! I enjoyed the shift to Ruth's narratorship, and the content dealing with her ED and self-loathing is really well handled I thought -- and you know, an interesting interpretation of Pentheus. That is a legit space of moral control for young women.

But now to the real nerd talk! I disagree with Davidson's interpretation of the Bacchae.
I do not think we are meant to completely accept Pentheus's understanding of what the Maenads are doing. He is literally seeing things, and experiencing the folding together of ritual and actual space. And pretty explicitly, his interest is driven by a puritanical view which combines hypocritical moralism with abject fascination, he is not exactly objective. Davidson seems to subscribe to a view that the messenger's tale and Pentheus monologues are accurate and the Maenads are behaving in weird sexual ways. They seem to spend most of their time weaving and doing household chores outside. Anyway, be that as it may, even if we take Davidson's interpretation, none of the Bacchic rituals that occur are particularly edgy? Most people drink a lot of wine, there seems to be a handful who have party drugs, a couple of people have sex outside -- like this is less Bacchic than your average music festival! The enforcers "tufting" -- beating up homeless people -- is at least shocking. But in general, things are pretty bland, and that is a real problem. As well the incest between Anders and Anna is just so telegraphed and so typical of this kind of thing -- to the point where Lucy isn't even that shocked!

I liked the use of social media and technology in this very much. I liked the abrupt and unexpected ending. Having said that, I wish I liked this more than I did, because there are some good elements.

[Ali · Rating 2 out of 5]

A weird book, but not weird in the sinister and foreboding way it was so, so desperately trying to achieve. In fact, while technically sinister things happened, the pacing and total lack of ability to summon up any dramatic tension just failed the concept completely.

I'm a sucker for the concept, it's that old "young adults create a subculture to do scandalous or just fun but strange things in the theme of some antiquity but everything goes deadly wrong and also there's an inappropriate sexual proclivity here somewhere," an attempt in the spirit of A Secret History, The Finishing School, The Lake of Dead Languages, If We Were Villains, sort of The Shadow Year, but it's so bad. The pacing is bad, the characters are ill developed, it's too short to make anything that happens seem important, the characters all have the same voice which is bizarre, that one voice is stilted and formal in an inexplicable way (it would work for 1.5 of them but not all of them), and things are brought up and have inordinate amounts of time spent on them with no payoff or reflection whatsoever.

I would be prepared to be forgiving to this book if it were the author's first work, but it's not. It's earnest, and I can appreciate what she was trying to go for. But at this point, she needs to be better at getting there. It's short, so it's not a waste of much time, but it's a pathetic attempt at a novel.

[Lilia Destin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Found this on a list of books said to be "similar to The Secret History." I cannot in good conscience recommend this to anyone looking for that same academic yet chilling thriller. Rather, this book takes the "academia" a bit too far in that the dialogue was so formal that it was impossible to get a base read of anything they said, prompting a second or third look over. While the premise of a mysterious rift between reality and "games" is tantalizing, the plot just refused to deliver in any satisfying way. Instead, the book is chock full of academic game-theory jargon that I found myself subconsciously skimming over, ultimately missing the thing that connects the 3 main characters. As for these 3 women, they're written in such a strange way I could not pin them down, while certain traits were made painfully obvious. For instance, Ruth is hyper-analytical and often second-guesses herself, but for the author to include parenthetical passages in Ruth's POV that will defensively explain exactly what she meant by what she said was almost insulting to the reader's ability to identify subtle traits. And, unfortunately, the ending was overall very unsatisfying, and I felt just generally confused as to why I had read the first portion of the book if it had nothing to do with how the book ends.

[Marlena · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had so much potential, but instead was bogged down with underdeveloped subplot and narration changes I can only describe as clumsy. The characters all felt distant and underdeveloped, and I found myself uninvested in all of them. The ending is abrupt, with what I believe to be insufficient lead up to the climax, as much of the development had nothing to do with the plot line said climax took place in. The writing felt tedious, with many things that could have been said in a single sentence drug out for paragraphs with an overabundance of SAT vocab words that distracted from the story rather than enhanced it. This is coming from someone who cites Les Mis and A Tale of Two Cities among her favorite books, and is thus no stranger to long-windedness, rather enjoying it when it is done well. In this case it was not. The phrasing was at some points laughable for how robotic and unlike human speech it was, far too formal to be believable. The overarching concept of a Bacchian game had so much potential and was the reason I was drawn to the book in the first place, but I found the game itself to be underutilized and far less rooted in its textual inspiration than I had hoped.

[Juniper · Rating 3 out of 5]

“Life seemed to fall more often into the patterns of melodrama than ideally mandated by the aesthetic properties of tasteful storytelling.” I wanted to love this campus thriller set in my very own Morningside Heights, but I settled for liking it. Inspired by Euripides’s Bacchae, it follows three grad students active in live-action, site-specific games as the line between reality and play starts to blur. I love this premise, but the prose felt like a chore: the book talks like it went to Columbia and wants to make sure you know it. There’s only so many academic ten-dollar words I can stomach! Yet, I admire Davidson’s formal explorations – she incorporates blogs and chat-style dialogue – and she sticks the landing with a terse, unsettling ending.

[Mallory · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a real bummer. Interesting plot but really poorly executed. The dialogue was stilted and didn't feel organic (no one says "where shall we head to then" instead of "where do you wanna go"). There were a lot of times reading this book that took me back to college when you needed to up the word count so you drew sentences out by switching out words with phrases and when you wanted to sound more intelligent so you looked up synonyms that you'd never actually used a day in your life which only resulted in a shambolic, hard to follow sentence. The first 2 "chapters" did little to help develop the characters. The third seemed to have promise, but then things end with no real explanation. This whole thing seemed like a first draft and not a published novel.

[Alexis Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of a weird book...!

This book was just OK for me. While it did have a climax and fall, it took a long time to get going, and I never really got super into it. It centers around 3 key characters playing these role-playing games and dealing with their own tragedies. If you like Shakespeare or Greek mythology or older stories like that, you may have an interest in how they interpret the stories and spin them into the book. When I first bought the book a few years ago it had really great reviews, so maybe I’m just missing something? I say proceed with caution and an open mind. Good luck!

[Emma Getz · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am really disappointed by this book. The concept was extremely interesting and I think there was real potential at a story to be told, but this fell completely flat.
The writing was messy, adverb-heavy, and a weird mix of informal and too formal. There was no character development and the dialogue was very forced and unnatural. I wasn't drawn into any of the characters, so the ending made me feel nothing.
On a positive note, though, the information about game theory and such was interesting. The novel itself was not.

[Tess · Rating 2 out of 5]

The promise of The Secret History vibes, and another book set at my place of business Columbia University (the main character even works in my department!) was just not enough for me to connect with THE MAGIC CIRCLE. It was a bit confusing, and the characters were not very well-formed, so I found myself skimming parts. It ending was pretty shocking though, so I was happy when the last part of the book pulled me back in. It’s extremely academic, and so fun for anyone who is familiar with Columbia, but just not a book I would widely recommend.