Rating: 
Summary: endless piffle
Review: pee yew! This one is a stinker. I realize you must suspend belief when reading fiction. But for 550 never ending pages? Give this one a miss. Read The Eight instead.
Rating:
Summary: What a mess....
Review: Finished The Magic Circle yesterday and am still trying to figure out why it was published. I have to agree with all other negative reviewers, I'm afraid. This story is pointless, comprised mostly of dialogue, much of it redundant and culminating in little more than a tangled family tree. Supposedly a quest for documents and artifacts that would permit the finder to rule the world, after Ariel (aka Hotshot), Sam, Pod, Pandora, Dark Bear, Bambi, Wolfgang, and the cat collect the prize, nothing happens. Who edited this piece of work, I wonder!
Rating: 
Summary: Don't bother
Review: Listen to all the other people that said this was a not worth your time. The Eight was a wonderful book. This one though was interesting only at times and more often tedious and confusing. If you can't find anything better to read between your favorite author's new releases, pick this up. Otherwise find something else to spend your time reading.
Rating:
Summary: Not worth the effort to unravel
Review: There's a Big Secret, hidden from the primordial past! Silly young cat-lover inherits the Big Secret! Products-of-incest family members try to get the Big Secret! Let's go skiing! Where's my cat? I'm related to who? There's a saying in the online world that if you have to drag in [...] to make your point, you automatically lose the argument. The Big Secret is never explained, other than pointing out that you can draw a straight line on a map between Delphi and Nuremburg.
Rating:
Summary: Chaotic, hard to follow and just plain boring
Review: After reading The Eight, I looked forward greatly to this novel. What a disappointment! The story was disjointed, mostly uninteresting, the characters unappealing - I put it down midway through and never felt the desire to pick it up again! In thinking about why I was so unsatisfied, I think The Eight had a great balance of history, the supernatural, and some very interesting characters following a complex, but fascinating storyline. This book has none of those - don't waste your time.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid this one
Review: Katherine Neville's other two books are loads of fun - The Eight is a fantastic book, and A Calculated Risk is really entertaining, even if it doesn't hold together as well. But I was really disappointed with this book. The plot falls apart early in the book, and it goes downhill from there. I didn't care at all about the characters, and the whole book feels like the author is simply trying too hard. Read Neville's other two books and stop there.
Rating: 
Summary: A mystery that just... fizzles out
Review: The summary of the plot at the back of the book, drew me like a beacon. A family secret spanning eons, goes back to the time of Christ and his last days. A riddle that whomever should solve it, would have power over the world. A millennium book with historical mysteries. Just my thing!!! As the book progressed, it all went downhill. I admire what the author had set out to do, but unfortunatelly she never accomplished it. The protagonist's family is so mingled and confusing (they were even related to Hitler at some point) that it bordered on fantasy. The world is not THAT small! Lots of historical mysteries (even something to do with the Gordian knot, but never really explained), too much actually, since they confused the reader more than enlightened him/her. Everything builds to the big climax, which never arrives (at least I didn't see it) and if it did, it was very dull and severelly disappointing. The riddle, when finally deciphered, was a load of clap-trap. It would have been such a great book if the author didn't pile miles and miles of stuff on top of it, just to make it complex. (...)
Rating:
Summary: Itsa notso great
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: Fun, yet complicated
Review: �The magic circle� has all elements that make me get interested in a book: historic happenings and characters, ancient relics, world domination, etc. Besides, I�d previously read Neville�s �The eight�, a very good book. So, my expectations with �The magic circle� were high. The story revolves around Ariel Behn and her heritage, a bunch of historic documents and manuscripts that have a powerful meaning; it seems many people know what those documents mean, but Ariel herself has been left in the dark by her family, and she doesn�t know nothing about them. The plot is about Ariel disclosing the documents� meaning, while revealing to the reader the many complicated connections between her large and chaotic family (I suggest the reader make notes on the Behn family, otherwise he will be going back on the text to remember who is someone�s mother, father, cousin, brother, sister, etc.) and another, historical plot, involving Jesus Christ, roman emperors, and Adolf Hitler.
The book is good enough, and achieved what I expected. But, in the end, I felt the complicated plot was not entirely well developed. I was left with the feeling that something was missing. I mean, the book doesn�t end well. It simply stops. Neville could have used another hundred pages to give the reader a more satisfatory conclusion to the lots of interesting historical facts, information and relations depicted in the story. Otherwise, I have to compliment Katherine Neville, because this book was clearly difficult to write, and her research must have been painfully difficult to provide the accuracy this book clearly has. Grade 8.2/10
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