Moderating The Night Circus

This past February I had the opportunity to moderate our book club's monthly discussion.  I have been apart of this amazing club for about two years but have never moderated before so I was really exicted to try it out!  The book we discussed was the magical novel, The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern.  This book is filled with the most enchanting imagery, everything mentioned in this story sounded so amazing and unbelievably magical and beautiful.  So, we of course had to recreate as much from the book as we could! Since I was the moderator, I was in charge of creating a powerpoint for our discussion, bringing some decorations and creating a menu that were inspired by the novel.  Here are some pictures of what Bethy and I came up with to try and recreate The Night Circus:

We tried to recreate the feeling of a black and white striped cirucs tent by making a create paper tent ceiling

Tarot cards and circus tickets

The Night Circus, or Le Cirque Des Reves (Circus of Dreams) was made up of a collection of black and white stripped tents that each had something intriquing to see, not just one large one with only one act.  We had several of the tents mentioned throughout the novel represented in different areas.  Here we recreated the Bedtime Stories tent, each bottle contains a different story and when you uncork the bottle you find yourself enveloped in the story, whatever it may be ...

I had a raffle and a prize for the winner (prizes will be pictured later in the post)

Our yummy dessert table!  Our menu was a combination of circus food as well as black and white dishes. So our table of sweets was made up of churros with cream cheese dipping sauce, black and white chocolate covered strawberries, caramel popcorn, black and white cookies and dark, salted caramel apples.  For the main course we had gourmet hot dogs, black and white tea sandwhiches, bagguette slices with goat cheese and olive tapanade, and a red berry salad for that splash of red that was so critical to the storyline of the book.  It was quite the delectable black and white circus feast, everyone did such an amazing job on their food assignments!

Another tent we made sure to include in our decorations was the enchanting ice garden.  It was so beautifully described that it would be one of the tents I would head to first if the Night Circus ever came to visit Salt Lake City. As the name implies, it was a gorgeous garden where absolutely everything in it, down to the blades of grass, were made entirely out of ice.

On the other side of the table we had the wishing tree, which is some what connected to the ice garden, they were created kind of in response to each other (If you haven't read the book, you seriously need to, it is amazing) In the wishing tree tent, guests would select a candle, make a wish, then use one of the candles on the tree to ignite your wish then you add it to one of the branches of the tree.  I bet it is a gorgeous sight to see!

In the book the circus has quite a dedicated following, members of this group identify themselves by wearing either black or white and always have a flash of red, a red scarf or a red rose in their hair or in the button hole of their lapel etc.  So all our group came dressed as revers (dreamers) and they all looked fabulous!

The discussion went great!  Everyone was so excited to talk about this book, most of our book clubbers gave it a 4-5 star rating!  I had three prizes, one for the raffel and two for the top scorers of the quiz I gave at the end of my presentation. Kelly D., Lisa, and Shelease were the lucky winners of my prizes.  Everything in the prize related to the book some how.  Part of their package was a box of chocolate mice that I made by hand, they were indeed a labor of love, but they turned out so cute!

Kelly made a CD with songs that related to the book to include in the prize packages, these are the songs that she thought to include:

I made packages of soft and chewy caramel popcorn as favors for people to take home to remember their magical evening at our version of the Night Circus!

It was such a fun evening and everyone was so helpful and supportive.  I loved being able to moderate such a special book club meeting.  I look forward to moderating a different book next year, maybe .... It will be a little more low key next time .... I just couldn't help myself with all the imagery that was in this book, I just had to use it all!