I picked up Carnival Row: Tangle in the Dark for free, as an audible original in October. It’s a prequel story for the Amazon series Carnival Row. Reviewers on goodreads seem to agree it makes a lot more sense if you’ve seen the show. I haven’t, but I’m curious about it now. I enjoyed it and I’m happy I gave it a shot, but I can’t say that I’d recommend someone go out and buy it unless they’re a fan of the show.

I really like the premise, it’s mostly a love story between two students with very different backgrounds and values, as a war erupts between fae and humans. I liked the two planes and how changes in the background affected the characters and their relationship, even though they were just civilians, not politicians or military as is far more common in fantasy stories I’ve read.

I pictured the setting pre-WWI, but I think it might be closer to Steampunk in the show. For a story about fae, they don’t use magic very much, other than having wings (and weird sex magic) they could be subbed for humans. 

For how short the book was I felt it did quite a lot, especially with characters and the relationships between them evolving. Tourmaline is a glitzy aristocrat with fancy friends and Vignette is a poor country girl come to the big city for the first time, but both of them evolve and their relationship changes a lot. 

My main annoyance was that the story is circular, it begins with a scene, a weird fairy sex magic scene, from near the end of the story, then jumps back in time. I didn’t feel like that added enough to be justified, as the character and context of the scene only becomes clear very late, and it caused a lot of confusion because it wasn’t really clear that there was a time jump. 

Overall it was enjoyable and interesting, but personally, I would have rated it a lot higher without the circular structure thing. 

Bingo squares: novella, media tie-in, audiobook, small scale, published in 2019, long title,