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The Magic Circle: A Novel Paperback – March 26, 2013

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 208 pages
  • Publisher: Little A / New Harvest (March 26, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0544028090
  • ISBN-13: 978-0544028098
  • Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 0.6 x 8 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #432,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

This intelligent but uneven novel centers on three woman friends, all postgrads at Columbia University, where the author is a professor of comparative literature. The three—Ruth, Lucy, and Anna—have related academic interests and a common recreational passion for gaming, specifically Live Action Role Playing. A game of their own devising, with literary and mythic components, centered around Columbia’s Morningside Heights (NYC) neighborhood and campus—the site of the former Bloomingdale Insane Asylum—gets edgy and, predictably, after the arrival of Anna’s brother, Anders, out of control. While the novel displays a strong sense of place and character, its narrow focus may limit its audience, although those interested in gaming and role playing will find much to like here. Recommend Davidson’s tale to readers of Lev Grossman’s more complex treatment of computer gaming in Codex (2004). --Mark Levine

Review

“Davidson deftly orchestrates a startling collision between the classical and the contemporary, reality and play.”—Kirkus

"There's an adventurous imagination at play and Davidson's formidable intelligence is like an electric current running through the pages of this compendious book."—Los Angeles Times

"Jenny Davidson's The Magic Circle is an intriguing and rewarding novel that follows the friendship and immersion of three smart young women in live action role playing games. Comparisons to the work of Muriel Spark and Donna Tartt (Megan Abbott called the book A Secret History as directed by Whit Stillman) are wholly deserved"—LargeHeartedBoy

"Jenny Davidson has created nothing less than an intellectually captivating story with The Magic Circle…I found this novel to be absolutely intriguing from start to finish."—The Book Barista

"The Magic Circle is elegant, brutally smart, and utterly absorbing--A Secret History as directed by Whit Stillman...A delirious, hypnotic page-turner about the ruthless games female friends play with, and on, each other.”—Megan Abbott, author of Dare Me

"For many years, those in search of an erudite, smart, sassy, vibrantly intelligent mystery blog went to Jenny Davidson, and she wrote too of deeply intellectual matters on an easy in yer face tone. She rocked. And now…The novel. Bliss. Imagine Iris Murdoch, channeling Janet Evanovich and cribbing the sheer art of P.D. James’s gripping storytelling, and you'd have the tone and flavour of Davidson's novel. It's that book, and oh so beautifully readable."—Ken Bruen, author of The Hackman Blues and The Guards

“Edgy and erudite, sexy and engrossing: This is one seriously fun book.” —Emily Barton, author of Brookland

"Like a novel by a 21st-century Muriel Spark, this book about smart women, dangerous games, and the roles we play in life enthralled me. I loved it."—Sara Gran, author of Claire Dewitt and the City of the Dead and Dope

See all Editorial Reviews

Customer Reviews

2.9 out of 5 stars
5 star
11%
4 star
19%
3 star
27%
2 star
35%
1 star
8%
See all 37 customer reviews
Fair warning that books like this aren't meant to end happily.
sanoe.net
I found that aspect of the book interesting but I came away from the characters not knowing them and not caring about them.
Mary Madis
I fell asleep reading it several times and nearly left it on the subway once accidentally.
Avid Reader

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful
Just not very good.
By Avid Reader on February 6, 2013
Format: Paperback Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Reading the description of this book, I thought that it was basically written for me. How wrong I was. I have no idea why it was written. Nor why it was published. It's just not very good! The story is derivative (most notably of The Secret History, one of my favorite books of all time) and not very engaging. I assumed from the description and from the size of the book that it was YA, but references to sex and alcohol are the only reasons it couldn't be (yes, the girls are in their 20s, but as academics they live an essentially high school/undergrad lifestyle). Not only their lifestyle felt YA to me, though; the characters also felt immature and underdeveloped. I can tell the author has tried to capture the different voices of the three main female characters, but I was left with very little sense of their individual personalities and a clear sense of what the author's interests were: their fashion, their personalities, their eating disorders. Not even their relationships were done in a way that was more than passing, which is a shame as female relationships are such an amazing thing to explore.

The plot itself, as thin as it is, focuses on games, I guess. There's a fair bit of academic buildup (including ideas for a game that never materializes and seems to just disappear) about game play in general before the plot shifts exclusively to the recreation of the Bacchae. The three main characters are listless, underdeveloped women who don't seem to have any ambitions aside from the vague notion of "academia." Two of them are college friends and roommates, and the third is a mysterious Swedish woman who might be a compulsive liar, a sex addict, a thief, and/or mentally disturbed.Read more ›
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11 of 12 people found the following review helpful
For fans of Tam Lin and The Secret History
By Umm Lila VINE VOICE on January 26, 2013
Format: Paperback Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
Three young academics in New York are friends, and their mutual interests converge in developing the ideas for games based in the landscape and architecture of the area around Columbia University. What started as arguments and theory transitions to risky reenactment of a mythological drama. The draw in this book is less the game and more the female protagonists and their stories. The book is divided into three sections, the first being a third person introduction and the latter two told from the perspective of two of the protagonists. The first section needed better editing because it doesn't draw the reader in as much as the more personal narratives. There are a lot of truly clanky sentences that a good editor should have reworked.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Interesting, but fell short of expectations
By Chris VINE VOICE on June 10, 2013
Format: Paperback Vine Customer Review of Free Product ( What's this? )
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.Read more ›
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful
LARPing the Classics
By Kio Stark on March 26, 2013
Format: Paperback
The Magic Circle is a great read, following three women game designers as they descend from their academic theories into a live action role playing game (LARP) based on classical literature. I say descend advisedly. As they move from theory onto the streets, the story gets darker and more emotionally complex, and no one is quite sure anymore what's real and what's game. Davidson lets the reader play at being an academic full of theory and jargon, and then at being a participant in a game that transforms experience in real, messy, unpredictable ways. Like any good game, the book toys with your sense of what is real and what isn't, and your ability to tell the difference.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Strange, lovely novel about lives twisted up with literature and smartphones
By JSE on March 26, 2013
Format: Paperback
Strange and kind of great new novel by Jenny Davidson about young intellectuals who believe in the power of text more than is perhaps good for them. "Text" here means books, as you'd expect, but also text-as-in-texting and chat windows and games. A lot of the dialogue is in an interestingly distant Delmore Schwartz register. It reads strangely at first but makes sense once you get used to it.

What I liked best is this. The book gestures at being one of those in which real life gives way to the fantastic, but ends up insisting (correctly, I think!) that when the fantastic intrudes into ordinary life, it does not replace ordinary life but rather overlays it -- so that one can have the most heightened and extrawordly experience possible, and then go home, with the smell of it still on you, and check your e-mail and brush your teeth. It is a novel for the world of Google Glass, and should be read whether or not the world of Google Glass turns out to be our world.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Three Stars

Not my type of reading. Seemed to jump around a lot.

Published 8 months ago by JPJ
writing style

I did not care for the writing style. I decided with all the good books available, I did not need to read one that I was not enjoying

Published 13 months ago by Judith Montgomery
Boring book

I am not sure why I kept reading it, I thought it would get better. I'm not stupid, but some of the passages were too confusing to follow.

Published 14 months ago by Elizabeth E. Schlosser
New York city lovers

For NYC lovers, you will love this book. I found that aspect of the book interesting but I came away from the characters not knowing them and not caring about them.

Published 15 months ago by Mary Madis
Highly recommended.

Sat up all night reading it. This is an extremely well written page turner. I found it to be one of the
best books I've read this year and highly recommend it.

Published 19 months ago by Jule Laudisio
Hollow Circle

_The Magic Circle_ is very readable, and it kept me engaged enough through its short length that I never felt bored, but that's almost all I can say in its favor, sadly. Read more

Published 19 months ago by Amanda M. Hayes
Wondering where it is going

This book is not that exciting; I am wondering where it is going. I will be finished with it soon.
There's not much magic in it; there is geographic locators, but the main... Read more

Published 19 months ago by Mary Madis
Skip it.

After I read the description of this book I was eager to read it. Unfortunately the description was the best part. Read more

Published 20 months ago by amanda
Academic fiction

I felt like I was reading a required textbook written by a professor who consulted with a creative writing teacher. Read more

Published 21 months ago by C.E.
interesting at times

There are things I liked and didn't like about this book. I like the references to the Greek literature and the gods but did not get into the role-action games. Read more

Published 21 months ago by reviewer

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