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A review by directorpurry
Great Night by Chris Adrian
1.0
No.
Just... no.
There's way way too much going on here; I thought I would be reading a modern retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night Dream, not this.... mess. There's a huge focus on the backstories of the characters. Tons of flashbacks to their lives that led them to this point.
But I didn't care. They were mostly unlikeable and I wasn't especially connected to any of them. They were all happy to throw around slurs against trans, queer, and neurodivergent people. The main gay character had OCD, but I didn't really understand how it fit into the story and it honestly felt like such a stereotypical case (all physical compulsions of cleaning, very very little touching on the obsessive thoughts0 that I just wanted it to stop.
There's so much sexual content, which perhaps isn't unwelcome in a Midsummer retelling, but I felt most of it had no purpose. In general, I don't seek out books with sexual content and this was just egregious and often gross.
The Rude Mechanicals were in, maybe, four chapters, but they were built up so much that it just added another unnecessary layer of complexity to this story.
By far the best part of this book was Oberon and Titania and their dead changeling child. But there was a ton of content about them in the past and not enough in the present of the story. I would much have preferred to read a piece solely focused on them during the whole debacle. I liked them much better than Henry, Will, and Molly.
While there were some moments of solid world building and I enjoyed setting it in Buena Vista in San Francisco, a park I've been to several times, the characters and their heavy and overwhelming backstories drew the whole piece into a downward spiral. The disjointed nature of the story didn't help much either.
Just... no.
There's way way too much going on here; I thought I would be reading a modern retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night Dream, not this.... mess. There's a huge focus on the backstories of the characters. Tons of flashbacks to their lives that led them to this point.
But I didn't care. They were mostly unlikeable and I wasn't especially connected to any of them. They were all happy to throw around slurs against trans, queer, and neurodivergent people. The main gay character had OCD, but I didn't really understand how it fit into the story and it honestly felt like such a stereotypical case (all physical compulsions of cleaning, very very little touching on the obsessive thoughts0 that I just wanted it to stop.
There's so much sexual content, which perhaps isn't unwelcome in a Midsummer retelling, but I felt most of it had no purpose. In general, I don't seek out books with sexual content and this was just egregious and often gross.
The Rude Mechanicals were in, maybe, four chapters, but they were built up so much that it just added another unnecessary layer of complexity to this story.
By far the best part of this book was Oberon and Titania and their dead changeling child. But there was a ton of content about them in the past and not enough in the present of the story. I would much have preferred to read a piece solely focused on them during the whole debacle. I liked them much better than Henry, Will, and Molly.
While there were some moments of solid world building and I enjoyed setting it in Buena Vista in San Francisco, a park I've been to several times, the characters and their heavy and overwhelming backstories drew the whole piece into a downward spiral. The disjointed nature of the story didn't help much either.