The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern My rating: 4 of 5 stars Really 3.5 stars, but I rounded up because of the quality of the writing. A circus of dreams, open only during the hours of darkness. An ancient duel between two powerful sorcerers, enacted by proxy through a succession of students who are never allowed to understand why they are competing, or for what. A love story as doomed as it is inevitable. Lovely writing, sumptuous imagery, ingenious and exotic magics. All the ingredients, it would seem, for a truly extraordinary book. And yet, though this is a novel of wonderful parts, somehow the whole didn’t add up for me. Perhaps because the cool present-tense narration is distancing, making it difficult to engage with the characters. Perhaps because the multiple points of view–including the reader’s, in a guided tour of the circus–are too diffuse, and these different story threads…

Dearly, Departed by Lia Habel My rating: 4 of 5 stars Sexy teenage zombies? Yeah, I was skeptical too. But in Dearly, Departed Lia Habel just about made me believe it. This is a fun adventure/romance with an intriguingly unusual take on the zombie theme. Yes, there’s a zombie plague, with hordes of ravening flesh-eaters–but some zombies wake up with their minds intact and are able to refrain from gobbling flesh. Of course they require a lot of medical and mechanical intervention by sympathetic living people to keep them from, well, rotting away–Habel comes up with some ingenious steampunkish scenarios for zombie maintenance–but otherwise they can live pretty much like normal people. This YA debut novel is well-plotted and paced, with exciting action scenes and a host of appealing characters (and, of course, some pretty horrible bad guys). The romance between the living heroine and the zombie hero develops believably,…