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3.06 AVERAGE
3.06 AVERAGE
Wow, wow, wow. What a gorgeous, heartbreaking, ribald, beautiful, mesmerising, intoxicating concoction of a novel this is. The plot is as light as fairy dust: three people wander into San Francisco's Buena Vista Park on a midsummer night's eve, on way their to a party. On this magical Great Night, Titania and her court hold sway over the park ... and our characters soon get lost, both physically and metaphorically. Chris Adrian then proceeds to tell their back stories, how they have all been wounded and exalted in love, and slowly reveals the inter-connections that bind them and absolve them. Exquisitely written, this was an absolute joy to read from its magical start to the bittersweet ending.
This book - a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, is written by an obviously very talented and intelligent author. Maybe if you really like the original Shakespeare, you'd like it. I don't have a problem with a bit of fantasy woven into literature myself, but this book called for a bit more suspension of reality that I had going for me today. In fact, the only reason I finished it at all was because I was stuck on a 5 hour flight with nothing else to read. Also, the book was extremely sexual, it seemed to me in a gratuitous way; at times felt more like porn than literature.
I'm still at a loss as to how to describe this book other than weird. One of the oddest things I've read in a while. Really, that's about it. Well written, definitely, but not sure I really liked it. Or disliked it. I'm very ambivalent. It's a retelling of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" with a contemporary, non-fantasy-like feeling. It's just...odd. I'm pretty sure my favorite character was Huff-a homeless guy who was convinced that the mayor of San Francisco was eating his fellow homeless peers. Very entertaining.
Chris Adrian is a breathtakingly good wordsmith, but I think his needlessly complex narratives get away from him. The premise is great: a grief-deranged fairy god unleashes a deeply malevolent force, trapping a group of not-particularly-stable mortals with them in a contemporary San Francisco park. Too bad he ends up juggling too many characters, back stories, and side plots to keep the whole thing glued together. When it works, it's wonderful, but most of the time it doesn't.
I really enjoyed Adrian's The Children's Hospital, and so when I saw that he'd written a reimagining of one of my favorite Shakespeare plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream, I was very intrigued. I wanted to like this one more than I did; in reality, I think I would rate this book 2.5 stars out of 5, but I liked enough of it to round up. I think I may grow to like this one more in retrospect than I did while reading it; the parts of the novel I liked the most were the histories of the different characters--seeing who they were before the Great Night, and seeing how their stories were tenuously connected.
This book has a great premise and I really wanted to like it, but all the characters were dismal. Despite some impressive description, the plot was much less fun than Shakespeare. I trudged through dutifully to the end, but never want to see it again.