Dive into the crazy game of Caraval

Corinne Johnson ASSOSIATE COPY EDITOR

A game of mystery with a touch of romance. Well, more than just a touch of romance. The thing is, you have six days to find clues so your kidnapped sister doesn’t get murdered by the man who designed the game. Sounds like fun.

The book series, “Caraval,” was written by Stephanie Garber starting in 2016 with the final book of the trilogy being released in 2019. This was Garber’s first stretch into young adult fiction and demonstrated that even though she was new to the genre, she could hold her own. The storyline was very well written and I love the amount of color symbolism.

In my opinion, Scarlett was written with a mild form of synesthesia, an occurrence where the person sees color in accordance with certain sounds and smells. For example, this could be seeing the number five and associating it with the color green.

This isn’t how Garber used it though, as Scarlett tended to use colors associated with emotions and taste, then describe the effect with descriptions that would fit in Wonderland.

I wasn’t a tremendous fan of this book series, but it still gets a three and a half stars, leaning towards three and three quarters out of five for me. According to reviews on Goodreads.com, a lot of people didn’t like the Caraval series. I admit that I was slightly disappointed with how quickly the story ended in the third book and my opinion was shared by a lot of reviewers.

The first book, “Caraval” is told in Scarlett’s perspective to set the story and the second book is told from Tella’s perspective while the third is told from both the sisters. The second book is called “Legendary” and the third is aptly named “Finale” to finish off the series. My favorite out of the three was “Legendary”.

The story follows Scarlett and Donatella (Tella), the daughters of an abusive man. Scarlett is filled with curiosity about Caraval, a magical show where the audience participates. Desperate to attend the performance, Scarlett sent letters to the ringleader for years, never receiving a reply until she ended her final letter with the fact that she is going to get married. Upon learning this, the creator sends her and Tella invitations to the game.

As the older sister, Scarlett is about to enter an arranged marriage with a man she’s never met. Scarlett is anxious, yet excited about getting married since it gives her and Tella a chance to escape their father.

Tella is full-heartedly against the marriage, thinking it is too good to be true, so Tella recruits an obliging sailor named Julian to help her and Scarlett off the island just a few days before the wedding is scheduled to take place.

Tella and Scarlett are polar opposites despite being sisters, and, as a person with a brother, I liked that it showed how the sisters interacted with each other, albeit in a sometimes violent way. Tella is a smart girl and knows how to use her intelligence for both good and bad while Scarlett is often scared and timid around everyone, always trying to protect her younger sister.

She is constantly trying to contain Tella and keep her safe, much to the dislike of her sister. She prefers to be in the middle of the party while Scarlett isn’t at the party because of her anxiety. Tella also has some form of anxiety, but she has an unhealthy habit of compensating for it by hooking up with random men and abusing alcohol.

This makes Tella one of my lesser liked characters because she constantly gets Scarlett in trouble, causing Scarlett to have to follow behind her and clean up what she left behind.

Upon arriving at the game, Tella disappears, kidnapped by the very maker of the game. Julian and Scarlett are then swept into the game despite just wanting to find Tella and get back home before the marriage is scheduled to take place. Everything quickly goes wrong and Scarlett is thrust into the wild game of Caraval.

One of the things that I wasn’t a big fan of was the amount of romance and pining after a certain character. In Scarlett’s perspective, every dirty comment or insinuation resulted in her blushing and pretending to ignore the person who flustered her, most commonly Julian.

This quickly got annoying because of how often she was flustered, but, despite the romance, it quickly became worth the amount of flirtations. The action started to pick up around halfway through the book and that’s what kept me interested.

“Caraval” was very focused on Scarlett’s need to find Tella and the romance along the way. I prefer books with more action compared to romance, but I would recommend this book for people who like more romance based mysteries.