Ill Met By Moonlight

Here's the thing with me and sci-fi/fantasy novels. The back cover always turns out to be more interesting than the actual book. In principle I always think I will like these books, but I have some sort of chip in my head that always switches over while I'm reading them that makes me think how silly they are.

This book, which had been on my Amazon wish list for years, seemed promising: it supposes that William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer-Nights Dream out of personal experience. Now that's a grabber. Shakespeare, as an eighteen-year-old schoolteacher, has just recently married Anne Hathaway (whom he calls Nan) and they have a baby, Susannah. One day he comes home from work and they are gone, and he eventually finds out they have been kidnapped by "the people under the hill," or elves and fairies. There's a power struggle going on among the fairyfolk, with a usurping king and a brother who enlists Will in his attempt to overthrow the crown.

Through the book, written by Sarah A. Hoyt, there's lots for fans of Shakespeare to savor, perhaps too much. The brother, called Quicksilver, has a nifty trick of being able to change sexes, and Will comes to know the female version as the "Dark Lady," a nod to the muse of the sonnets. There's also shreds and patches from many of the plays, including plot points, character names, and even whole sections of dialogue, such as a verbatim inclusion of Mercutio's death speech from Romeo and Juliet. I realize this is all in the public domain but I still find it cheeky that Hoyt so blatantly lifts the stuff. Maybe it's because when she writes her own dialogue it's very stiff romance novel blather.

Though I'm a very big fan of Shakespeare I'm not the demographic for this book because all this fairy dust stuff leaves me a little cold. Shakespeare himself avoided this pitfall in A Midsummer-Night's Dream, creating a magical world without making anyone want to roll their eyes, but Hoyt is not up to the challenge of pulling that off.