crystalleighwrites's reviews
336 reviews

The debut novel from Amy Dressler, HOW TO ALIGN THE STARS re-tells Shakespeare’s MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING, updating the setting to academia at a small college in the northwest US. I have a soft spot for anything Shakespeare, but a very high bar for anything MUCH ADO, it being my favorite of his works (and the basis for my own in-progress novel). This book not only met the bar, but leapt over it.

Dressler’s Beatrice is a college professor at odds with former classmate and current colleague Ben. Her Hero (now Heron) is a senior at the same college, in starry eyed love with her boyfriend Charlie. Told from the alternating perspectives of Beatrice and Heron, Dressler leans into the crossing of this romance with women’s fiction, building two fully formed, complex women into her story. Beatrice struggles with conflicted feelings about her own body — she is a strong, independent woman at heart, but she is aware of the fatphobia directed at her by so many in her past and present. While she is clearly happy with who she is, the walls she puts up to avoid being hurt might be doing more harm than good. Sweet and kind Heron harbors lingering anxiety from the trauma of her mother’s abandonment as a teenager. She clings to Charlie, molding herself and her life around him, something she doesn’t realize until it’s too late. Both of these topics are handled with care and consideration.

A full cast of secondary characters, used in perfect doses, builds a full image of Messian University and the other settings in the characters lives. The banter, something absolutely necessary in any adaptation of MUCH ADO, is sparkling. Every Shakespeare play has “problems” that its adaptor must tackle when approaching a re-telling. MUCH ADO has one of the biggest ones in its resolution, especially to a modern, feminist audience. Without venturing into spoiler territory, I can say that I found Dressler’s solutions to these problems extremely satisfying from a modern lens. They felt true to the characters and the growth I wanted to see from them.

HOW TO ALIGN THE STARS is the first in a planned “Shakespeare Project” by Amy Dressler. After reading this one, I’m excitedly looking forward to the next retelling.

Content Warnings