The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of The Magic Circle
Book Review: A Taut Thriller, with a heroine
Summary: 4 Stars
I got this book through Bookcrossing.com and it sounded interesting. When I began reading it, I found myself engrossed in a tale that deftly combined the past & the present, New Age, New World and Old World, Christianity and paganism, pretty much all things that you wwould not think could go together. Now that I have read Dan Brown's work, I can see similarities between Angels & Demons, for example, and The Magic Circle. If you liked DaVinci Code, Angels & Demons or Deception Point, you will like The Magic Circle. Read it and share it with someone today!
Book Review: A Thought Provoking, Brilliant Challenge, and a GOOD READ
Summary: 5 Stars
I don't have much time for fiction these days, but I read both the Eight and Magic Circle straight through. Neville is a rarity among modern writers...she obviously has the intelligence and strength of character to get past the formulaic machinery that publishers have been clamping down on popular fiction. The ambition and eruditon in her novels is remarkable enough. More importantly, they represent a real return to the authorial imagination that has been squuezed out of literature-as-mass commodity over the last few decades. To read Neville is to encounter an amazing intellect, a great story teller, and a teacher with the ability to make you rethink basic assumptions about western culture.Incidentally, having read the other readers reviews, it seems as though some witless cabal is inventing a dreary reaction against her book. Please note the preponderance of high reviews before this month, and the variety of the reviews before this month. Lately they seem all characterized by the same barely literate sentence fragments, key words, and one star rating, and a lack of ownership...a pattern that the managers of this board should investigate
Book Review: A Writer's Writer
Summary: 5 Stars
As a writer and freelance journalist, I recently read a review of "The Eight," and was prompted to go buy the book. I was completely blown away. To read the book and see the connections she made just completely astounded me. Her philosophies and theories set me to thinking, and I am developing some of those thoughts into one of my own new novels. Since reading "The Eight," I've also gone out and purchased her other books, and I have now finished "The Magic Circle." Neville's writings have affected me more than any other writer I've had the pleasure to read (and I've been reading voraciously since I was two). I've always enjoyed the literary masters for their use of the English language, and the way that they use words to mold the story, but she has also touched on a form that causes the reader to *think,* and to explore their own minds. If feel as if I have found a modern day Plato or Galileo in her writing. This is one fellow writer and reader who I will buy everything she writes.Book Review: A cheap copy of a cheap book....
Summary: 1 Stars
that is, "the Eight". Cartoonish, elitist, primitive. If my review seems too negative, I can express it in a different way: a sophisticated soap-opera by an author who knows where her limits are. The again, maybe she does not... Have mercy on the lady, she's only read too much Nietzsche, mixed with "Cosmopolitan" (Wait, I forgot Mme Blavatsky). The first time I tried to post this review, it was lost. Did I step on a Neville aficionado's toe?Book Review: A circle never ends
Summary: 1 Stars
I very much enjoyed this author's first novel, The Eight. With anticipation I picked up a copy of this one and found: the plot is almost non-existent, and long diatribes of Aryan-related metaphysical mumbo-jumbo stand in for it. The main character is by turns hideously stupid and smugly smart; the 'big surprise' is in fact neither very big nor terribly surprising. The title seems to herald a basic fact about the plot and about the way the story is told: one continues to run around in circles around the focal 'mystery', and never penetrates it. I'd strongly recommend her first novel instead. This one? Check it out from the library some day when you're completely without reading material. Buy it used.
But don't spend your money on it.