This was the other part that made me hesitate, though it simultaneously drew me in. They are witches, and each one of them has a connection to an element which gives them mystical abilities. There are six.ĭrawn together by a blood moon, Minoo, Anna-Karin, Vanessa, Rebecka, Ida, and Linnéa sleepwalk to an abandoned fairground, where they learn that they are the only people standing between the town of Engelsfors – and the whole world – and destruction at the hands of demons. The differences, however, are enough to make The Circle feel fresh and new to an audience familiar with Buffy.įor one thing, the demons are not vaguely humanoid monsters that the heroine must defeat through violent force they are more insidious creatures, capable of convincing people to do their will through subtle persuasion.įor another, there isn’t just one Chosen One in this series.

Both feature teen girls dealing the difficulty of saving the world and passing their classes, and both feature the girls fighting demons. After all, “high school girl gets powers and must save the world” is a familiar trope to people who read the right books, and the people most likely to read The Circle are also those most like to have watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think it’s simply the fact that it’s a matter of genre that makes The Circle feel so familiar. There are certainly similarities, and someone viewing from the outside might see them as essentially the same thing, but the two have very different aims and very different ways of trying to achieve those aims. It’s simply a matter of subgenre: Trying to compare magical realism to a more general fantasy is like trying to compare hard sci-fi to soft. This isn’t through any fault of either Spanish literature or Swedish. As far as I can remember, the only translated fantasy books I’ve read were magical realism, translated from Spanish, and I was curious as to how a Swedish novel might compare. I was a little uncertain – we’ve all read plenty of YA fantasy about high school girls who have to balance their daily lives and unexpected magical powers – but when I saw the book was translated from Swedish, I was intrigued enough to give it a shot. The Circle came to me, as so many other books have, through Tumblr. It gives me a chance to broaden my literary horizons and read something that might otherwise not have come to me. It is, therefore, a wonderful surprise when I stumble across a book that has been translated from another language and springs from another culture. The majority of the books I read, whether fantasy or another genre, were written in English and published in either America or Britain.

The circle engelsfors trilogy