Night Circus is a novel that anyone partial of fantasy will likely enjoy. The book has magic, romance, comedy, and mystery; all of which provide the book with an interesting and engaging narrative that is both relatively easy to follow but leaves just enough unexplained to have you craving for more. Night Circus seems to take great inspiration from other novels and media before its inception like Harry Potter, The Prestige, and Shakespeare, so it is safe to say that if you are fond of these, you will likely enjoy Night Circus.
However, the audio book, narrated by Jim Dale, is something that may be more difficult to enjoy. Mr. Dale does wonderfully with narration, but his attempts at providing alternate voices for characters during dialogue are sometimes quite distracting, out-of-place, or just poor, especially in cases of young female characters, of which there are several. An apt comparison of Dale’s performance would be Morgan Freeman’s narration of March of the Penguins, if Freeman also attempted to voice over the cacophony of the penguins speech with his own imitation of their screeches and caws. Still, the dialogue is only such with certain characters, and if you can overcome the dialogue of these characters, which I did, then the audio book is an overall pleasant experience. Although, if you asked me, I would’ve given the female dialogue to a female, for it seems more fitting to me.
For someone who has already read the book, I found the audio-book version to be one that I could listen to while I worked on other things, such as playing a game on my phone. Although, if you did not read the novel prior, this will likely not work for you. Moreover, since there is a plethora of characters, some of which one can easily mistake for another, reading along while listening to the audio book may be more helpful. Ultimately, it really depends on how you listen to (or should I say read?) an audio book. It should be noted though, if audio books aren’t your thing, then just read the book instead.