Caraval by Stephanie Garber is a Young Adult romantasy book that came out in 2017 and has been a decently popular series since it was released. At the center of the story is the idea of a magical event known as Caraval where the mysterious Legend uses magic to create games that start to feel real to the participants of the game. Each year, the winner earns a magical prize. At face value, Caraval sounds like a fun and engaging fantasy story with an interesting premise. But, the question is: Does it hold up to that premise? As with my other reviews, this will be a review with an in-depth breakdown on the world building in Caraval. There will be spoilers in this review, so I am warning you in advance about that. Now, let’s dive into Caraval, as well as my review and the analysis on the world building in this story.
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What is Caraval About?
Carval is about a girl named Scarlett Dragna who is the daughter of a powerful and wealthy man named Governor Dragna on the island of Trisda. Along with her sister, Donatella (Tella), the two girls have been trapped on Trisda for pretty much their entire lives. However, Scarlett dreams of seeing Caraval, the once-a-year performance in a faraway land where the audience participates in the interesting, high-stakes games.
Scarlett is set to be married off to Count Nicolas D’Arcy by her father, but she still dreams of going to Caraval. She is hoping that Nicolas will actually turn out to be a decent guy and that the marriage ends up being great after all.
Since she was a child, Scarlett has been writing to Legend to try and get entrance into Caraval. After so many years of writing, Legend finally gives Scarlett tickets with an invite to Caraval, but Scarlett cannot leave Trisda and so she feels quite disappointed by this.
However, Tella has other plans and the story starts out with Scarlett walking in on Tella kissing a sailor named Julian. Governor Dragna catches this happening and Scarlett says that she was kissing Julian, but Governor Dragna punishes Tella instead to make Scarlett feel worse about her mistakes.
Still, Tella is ambitious and decides to have Scarlett basically kidnapped and taken to the land where Caraval is to be taking place. Julian takes her there and the adventure pretty much begins from there.
Upon arriving in Caraval, the game turns out to be finding Tella, which is why Tella was nowhere to be seen after Scarlett was brought to Caraval. The game is twisted and very expansive, and everyone is also trying to use the clues to find Tella.
Along the way, Scarlett meets many performers and contestants in Caraval while she and Julian form a connection with each other. Things are very tense and there’s definitely a lot of twists and turns that happen throughout.
The more the game progresses over the five nights, the more things seem to get stranger and darker. However, the idea of Caraval is that everything is a game and that things that may seem real aren’t actually real. It’s a really interesting idea that makes you as the reader question quite a lot of what’s happening throughout the story.
Caraval World Building Analysis
Backstory
Caraval is a game that happens once every year and is highly alluring, with people constantly wanting entrance into the games. There are pretty high stakes present in Caraval, as the prize is basically whatever someone wants, which is obviously something that people would fight over.
Legend is the mysterious ringleader of Caraval and his magic is very entracing and allows him to create the illusionary majesty of Carval.
Scarlett and Tella live on Trisda, an island just outside of the mainland of the Meridian Empire. They live with their father, Governor Marcello Dragna, who is considered cruel and strict. He doesn’t seem to care much about his daughters’ happiness.
Legend’s backstory was revealed on pages 40-43, where Scarlett and Tella’s Nana tells them that Legend was once an ordinary, poor boy that was in love with a girl named Annalise. He was from a family of performers known as the Santos family and they all worked as playwrights and actors. They were very talented and Legend was considered the most handsome of them all. We don’t get what his real name is in this book, and you have to wait until Book 2 for that reveal.
Legend figured that he’d woo Annalise if he performed for Empress Elantine’s coronation in the Meridian Empire. He did not have any magic in that time, but he searched for a witch that could grant him some type of magic. The witch asked him what he wanted most and Legend said that “he wished to lead the greatest troupe of players the world had ever seen, so that he could win his true love, Annalise. But the [witch] warned that he could not have both things… he believed she was wrong. He told himself if he were famous it would allow him to marry Annalise. So he wished for that” (42).
The magic did come with a price though: The more Legend performed, the more he would become the role he played. Annalise ended up marrying someone else, breaking Legend’s heart. He supposedly swore that he would never love again.
The Lands
Carval is situated on Isla de los Suenos, which is the private island owned by Legend. It is about two days by boat from Trisda. We also know that there is the Meridian Empire and the Southern Empire, since Scarlett mentions that Julian has a “Southern Empire accent” (18). The Meridian Empire is massive, but Isla de los Suenos is not part of it, and is outside of the dominion of the Meridian Empire.
Not really much else is told to us, but we do have a map of the Caraval setup:
The idea of the games being held on several isles is pretty neat. It reminds me of Venice, which might be what she was going for since Venice has Carnivale and this story is called Caraval. Maybe I’m looking too deep into it though, LOL.
The Government
Mentioned briefly, the government in the world of Caraval is basically an Empire structure where we have an Empress named Elantine. We don’t know much else though. There’s governors as well, but it’s not clear how the distribution of power is structured and I think this should’ve been more explained. We have Count Nicholas D’Arcy, but what does this mean in the grand scheme? How does Scarlett being the daughter of a governor affect anything?
The Magic
The magic system in Caraval was not the most clear or defined magic system I’ve seen in a book. There seemed to be a lot of things that could be done, but it seems to me that the magic is not super defined or constricted. We know that Legend’s magic is at its highest during Caraval. We also know that there is a price to pay in that Legend turns more into the roles that he takes on during his magical performance. We are also aware of witches that exist in this world and that they can grant people magical powers.
Scarlett gets a magical dress that reacts to her emotions, which is an interesting idea and comes from Legend, so we know that Legend does have some pretty extraordinary abilities.
We know that Legend has the ability to bring people back to life when they die in Caraval, that his performers are ageless, and that he himself is basically just immortal. We also know that he cannot feel love and is considered pretty cruel by anyone who knows him.
There are other evidences of magic present in the story:
- Scarlett gives up a day of her life to get a clue for Caraval. She actually gives up two, but Julian takes one day. This is done by exchanging blood, a pretty bizarre style for magic, but blood seems to be a pretty important component of the magic in the series.
- Nigel is a fortune teller who is covered in tattoos and can reveal the future depending on what tattoo a person happens to be looking at in a particular moment.
- There are secret tunnel entrances scattered throughout the world of Caraval.
- Caraval only takes place at night and everything sleeps during the day, so the magic seems to work best at night or it’s for the aesthetics, it’s not clear why this is done.
We also know that there is one wish that someone is granted for winning Caraval, which is the grand prize and is basically anything that that person wants. In theory, this could be something like becoming immortal or becoming a king or something similar to that.
Religion
Religion is pretty minimal and scarcely mentioned in Caraval. We know that the characters believe in a deity of some sort, as they reference “God” quite a few times in swears such as “God’s Teeth!” or something similar to that.
However, there pretty much isn’t really anything beyond that. We don’t get any indication of the religious system of the characters nor what rituals are associated with these religions. We also don’t really get any glimpses into how death and the afterlife works, though we see Scarlett actually die for a whole day–unless this was an illusion, but that was not cleared up.
Culture and Language
We know that things sound Spanish and so from there, we can obviously deduce that the culture of the world of Caraval is Spanish-inspired at the very least. However, we do not get much else beyond that. There’s no indication of foods, rituals, cultural influences, etc… It’s not really gone in-depth for this aspect. We also know the language is basically just Spanish.
I feel like so much more could’ve and should’ve been done here.
Economy
This wasn’t really mentioned. We know that there is an Empire, but we do not have much of an indication of how money is made nor how the money operates in this world.
Character Analysis
Scarlett Dragna
Scarlett was the main character of Caraval and was a bit… OK for a character. I felt like she wasn’t as interesting as some of the other characters presented in the story. For the most part, she wasn’t really solving any of the issues of her own agency and was more reliant on coincidences or basically deus ex machina coming in to save her, which was a bit too frequent in my opinion.
Scarlett’s life growing up under a man like Governor Dragna would obviously affect her mentally though and would certainly cause her to feel things like a lack of confidence, fear of punishment and retribution, a lack of self-agency, etc… So honestly, I can’t really blame that character for acting the way she does. However, by the end of the story, I feel like she does break a lot of these things and try her best to win the game and it’s pretty interesting to see how she perceives the stakes around her.
Also, something that made no sense to me was the idea of her Synesthesia. Scarlett apparently sees feelings in color, but this is done as a descriptor constantly to the point where I literally had no idea that this was what Scarlett had for the whole book until someone online explained it. I just thought that the author wanted to explain everything too dramatically.
When depicting mental health, disorders, symptoms, etc… try your best to not overdo it and to actually show the consequences on the story. That would be my advice for things like this. Also, do TONS of research before depicting it, as this is what I did with Malware and all the books in The Fallen Age Saga. I had to understand what each character was supposed to have and how this would impact literally every aspect of their lives.
Julian
Julian is the swaggering sailor that steals Scarlett’s heart in the story and I honestly thought he was the most engaging character and I wouldn’t have minded reading the story from his perspective. He was really engaging and was written in a way that appeared to show that he was good with charisma and manipulation. He was also a smooth liar, which is something that definitely made it interesting since we have to figure out if Julian is telling the truth or not most of the time.
His romance with Scarlett was also pretty nice to read about. I felt like it wasn’t the best romance of all time, but it was enough to keep me invested in the story. I personally felt like he was written decently enough in this role, though there were lots of things that happened in the story to simply service tropes and romantic moments between him and Scarlett, which felt a bit more fanfic-y than I would’ve wanted from a fantasy book.
Tella
Tella was alright, but we didn’t really get that much from her perspective. She just seems to be more impulsive and more adventurous than her sister and has the capacity to do some pretty messed up things throughout the story. Books 2 and 3 reveal more about her as a character though.
Review
Overall, I think Caraval is the type of story that I would consider a fun read, but not a profound read. It’s definitely not the best in the world building department and it’s clearly more of a romance story with a sprinkle of fantasy in the background. I think that this is pretty much related to the fact that a lot of romantasy books these days tend to be like that, which is quite sad since world building is a really fun part of writing fantasy!
Reading Caraval sort of reminded me of when I used to read fanfiction when I was younger or stories on Wattpad. Those stories were always more written with tropes and to create a romance instead of much else of a plot and this book kind of felt like those books did. It served the purpose of being a romance but it didn’t serve the purpose of being a fantasy. We just had a very disconnected magic system that I wasn’t really sure I understood much by the end of the book.
There’s also just way too many plot twists in this book. I love plot twists and I think they’re some of the best devices to include in a story, but the plot twists just hit you one after the other and really in close proximity to each other.
Furthermore, I felt like something was just missing from the book. I have a feeling it’s not really Garber’s fault and more the fault of the publishers since this book clearly felt like it had content cut from it and was just stuffed with tropes to market. I honestly really hate how publishers treat books sometimes as you can really tell when a story isn’t fully there and that’s what I saw in Caraval: A story that had potential but wasn’t fully there.
In any case, I’d give this book a 3.75/5 for at least keeping me hooked enough to read in one sitting, but I don’t think it’s particularly profound. I still recommend if it you want something just to read and have fun with, but don’t go into this book expecting deep and intriguing world building.
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