Allen Bratton's Henry Henry chronicles a year in the life of Hal Lancaster. Readers already familiar with Shakespeare's history plays will immediatelyAllen Bratton's Henry Henry chronicles a year in the life of Hal Lancaster. Readers already familiar with Shakespeare's history plays will immediately recognize the landscape of Bratton's novel in this modern-day queer reimagining of the Henriad. There's Hal, the disaffected, wayward son; Henry, the stoic, dutiful father; Ned Poins, the working class, rowdy youth with whom Hal spends his days; Falstaff, the has-been drunkard who's obsessed with Hal; and Harry Percy, the rival, the golden boy—the dutiful son who exhibits all the ideal aristocratic traits Hal lacks. Readers unfamiliar with the narrative off which Bratton is riffing will lose very little in translation, as Bratton's characters are vividly realized, all authentic in their own right.
You can read my full review HERE on BookBrowse, and you can read a piece I wrote about Shakespeare's Henriad HERE....more
Classic literature retold through the eyes of a minor (or in this case, absent) female character is a trend that I am honestly growing a bit weary of,Classic literature retold through the eyes of a minor (or in this case, absent) female character is a trend that I am honestly growing a bit weary of, so perhaps some of my frustration with this book is down to the fact that I have read its ilk so many times in recent years. Reclaiming women's voices in fiction is an exercise that appeals to me so much in theory, and I've certainly read quite a few standouts in this subgenre, but so often these stories just hit the exact same exact narrative beats, examine the exact same themes which can be summarized, in brief, as: history has not been kind to women, isn't that sad. I mean, yes, of course, but I don't need a novel-length project to tell me what can be summed up in a sentence.
Learwife isn't quite a retelling, as it begins right where King Lear leaves off. I have to say right away that I was never fully on board with this premise: the ending of Lear feels so apocalyptic that extending the story feels fundamentally incompatible with the text in a way that I struggled with. (Also, in case you don't know this about me: hi, my name is Rachel and King Lear is my favorite Shakespeare play and literally one of my favorite pieces of literature of all time and I have read it more times than I can count and I'm afraid that I can't divorce myself from my love of this play when evaluating retellings.) In Learwife, JR Thorp accounts for the conspicuous absence of Lear's wife in the original story by positing that she was banished to an abbey shortly following the birth of Cordelia, the couple's youngest daughter. Learwife begins with Lear's wife receiving the news of Lear and her children's death—and then the novel just spins its wheels for several hundred pages, with Lear's wife at the abbey, considering visiting the place where Lear and her daughters died, but instead navigating nunnery politics while treating the reader to the odd flashback to her life at court.
The thing about Learwife that I struggled so much with was the fact that it didn't engage with the original story in any kind of worthwhile way. The mystery of why Lear's wife was banished is a lukewarm attempt at holding the reader's interest; the reveal is not only boring, but I also think it crumbles under a single ounce of scrutiny if you hold it up next to King Lear—it just isn't compatible with events and characters in a way that I think Thorp intends for it to be. But even if she didn't: for a novel which proposes to answer the age-old question of what happened to Lear's wife, I guess I was just hoping for that answer to be something that could realistically supplement the original play. A few quotes from Shakespeare are scattered throughout Learwife, like the following—I honestly just found the result a bit corny and try-hard:
Is that my name? I seem to lose it. I reach for it sometimes and there is nothing. Hands empty; hands full of water, of girls' hair. I smile. Well, it does not matter. Nothing will come of nothing.
I wish I felt like this was achieving something, but it honestly just leaves me with the impression that Thorp is sitting there patting herself on the back for shoehorning one of Lear's most recognizable lines in there. Nothing in this book does any work to augment or enrich the original play's events or themes.
But even putting that aside, even just attempting to evaluate this on its own merits and not contrast it to Shakespeare, I guess I just don't understand what the point of this book was. It's repetitious and thematically anemic; the abbey scenes are dull and the flashbacks of court are silly anecdotes that do nothing to craft a novel that stands on its own. This whole book feels like it serves no purpose except to construct the identity of a woman who remains elusive even after reading hundreds of pages of her stream-of-consciousness narration.
Also, a brief detour: in this book, Learwife had had a first husband, named Michael, of all things, and I just found that so silly and incongruous that it's worth mentioning. Also, the name Michael, as I understand it, has been used in England since the twelfth century; the legend of Lear, or Leir, would have taken place around the eighth century BCE. A friend did my homework for me and listened to a podcast with Thorp where she talked about deliberately transposing the play's setting to follow the advent of Christianity, as she was particularly interested in the religious tension in medieval England; a theme that I didn't think was given enough weight here to justify the change in setting. And speaking of changes: Lear is canonically eighty; here she makes him much younger, around fifty, a choice that chafes with the original text and doesn't really give the reader anything new to chew on.
Perhaps if I loved King Lear less I could have loved Learwife more, but I also found the prose style overwrought and tedious so at the end of the day I don't think I was ever going to get on with this book. It seems to have been mostly well-received (Jane Smiley, the author of my favorite King Lear retelling, gave it a mostly favorable review; and just anecdotally, none of my Goodreads friends has given this under a 4-star rating) so I'm not sure that I can in good conscience tell you to avoid if it appeals to you, but wow, literally nothing about this book worked for me. It didn't prompt me to think about the original play in a new way and it didn't give me enough to enjoy it as a story in its own right and I'm mostly just annoyed that I wasted my time with it....more
I only requested this anthology so I could read the Lear story and move on with my life (in my quest to read every Lear retelling I can get my hands oI only requested this anthology so I could read the Lear story and move on with my life (in my quest to read every Lear retelling I can get my hands on), but what can I say, once I had it on my Kindle I couldn't resist. Even though I don't particularly like YA and didn't have the highest of hopes that these stories would engage with the plays in particularly interesting ways. Still, there were some pleasant surprises here.
That Way Madness Lies is a YA anthology by a handful of noted writers, each retelling a different Shakespeare play. The selection of plays itself is very good--there are the crowd pleasers as well as a couple of unexpected ones. The organization of this anthology bothered me on a couple of levels--first off, why is The Winter's Tale placed in the Late Romances category but not The Tempest? We're also frequently treated to 1-page author's notes after stories, all of the same tenor; "this is why the original play was problematic and here's how I decided to fix it". Which, aside from being jarring and downright annoying, showed such a blatant disregard for Shakespearean scholarship that I had to laugh--yes, of course this is a commercial anthology intended for a young audience but my god, patting yourself on the back for being brave enough to consider The Merchant of Venice through Shylock's perspective as if scholars, directors, actors, and audiences haven't been doing exactly that for centuries is solipsistic to the extreme.
Anyway, as always with anthologies, it's a mixed bag. Some of these stories are unexpected and brilliant and others fall spectacularly flat. So, let's do this.
Comedies
"Severe Weather Warning" by Austin Siegemund-Broka and Emily Wibberley (The Tempest) - 4 stars A nice and melancholy snapshot into sibling rivalry as a storm rages outside, delaying Prosper's sister's flight to a prestigious internship that she effectively stole from her sister. Really enjoyed this one and felt that it was one of the most successful stories in accessing the original play's themes even as a nonliteral reimagining.
"Shipwrecked" by Mark Oshiro (Twelfth Night) - 3 stars Twelfth Night meets high school prom--we've got some love and heartbreak coupled with mistaken identity shenanigans as one twin has recently come out as nonbinary and has started to resemble their brother. It's a bit corny but mostly harmless.
"King of the Fairies" by Anna-Marie McLemore (A Midsummer Night's Dream) - 1 star Midsummer from the perspective of the "Indian" child abducted by Oberon and Titania. Hands down one of my least favorites from this collection; it couldn't be more heavy-handed and patronizing if it tried. If you like McLemore's writing you'll probably like this story; I simply do not.
"Taming of the Soulmate" by K. Ancrum (The Taming of the Shrew) - 3 stars A soulmate AU where Katherine doesn't see color until she meets Petrucio at her sister Bianca's party; rather an inconvenience for her 5-year plan. I take umbrage at a modern retelling framing Petruchio as the Reasonable One, but I grudgingly ended up appreciating where this story arrived.
"We Have Seen Better Days" by Lily Anderson (As You Like It) - 2 stars I found this story perplexing. As You Like It, as far as I'm concerned, is fertile ground for a reimagining that focuses on gender identity (a topic otherwise omnipresent in this anthology)--and instead we get... a story about summer camp nostalgia and daddy issues? Anyway, I'd be happy to put my expectations aside about what this had the potential to be if it were any good at all, but it was objectively one of the weakest in the collection.
"Some Other Metal" by Amy Rose Capetta and Cory McCarthy (Much Ado About Nothing) - 1 star I kind of hate Much Ado so I was probably never going to like this very much but... yeah, it was bad. It follows two actors, Tegan and Taron, who play Beatrice and Benedick on stage, and off-stage have an antagonistic relationship, but they’re trying to be set up by their director. The meta narrative was painfully obvious and would be more fun if you enjoyed Beatrice and Benedick's dynamic in the slightest which I can't say I do. This story is also set in outer space for reasons that are of absolutely no consequence?
"I Bleed" by Dahlia Adler (The Merchant of Venice) - 5 stars Annoying author's note aside I honestly adored this. The Merchant of Venice + high school doesn't seem like a match made in heaven--right down to Antonio's occupation being declared in the title, this is an inarguably adult work. Part of the fun, then, becomes seeing how deftly Adler adapts this story's mature moving parts to a context which shouldn't work at all... but somehow does, brilliantly. It's a very literal adaptation which otherwise isn't my favorite approach in this collection, but I found this one very successful.
A Sonnet
"His Invitation" by Brittany Cavallaro (Sonnet 147) - 4 stars A couple take a road trip to California in the only story in this collection that tackles a sonnet. I have to say, this one didn't make a huge impression on me as I was reading (part of it due to being the shortest story in this collection), but interestingly it's really the only one I'm still thinking about after having finished.
Tragedies
"Partying is Such Sweet Sorrow" by Kiersten White (Romeo and Juliet) - 4 stars Yes, the title is stupid, but let’s move on. White actually does a remarkable job at capturing the simultaneous foolishness and lovability of the titular protagonists. This story is told entirely in text speak which admittedly is not my favorite, but it makes for fast, feverish reading, which is probably the effect that White intended. This story I felt was one of the most successful at transporting the emotional landscape of Shakespeare to a much smaller and more modern setting, and hands down the most effective story in the tragedy section.
"Dreaming of the Dark" by Lindsay Smith (Julius Caesar) - 2 stars Julius Caesar meets a private girl’s school and dark magic. The context of this one was so utterly contrived (Briony and Cassie have just killed Julia as a sacrifice to a dark god; Annamaria wants revenge) I couldn’t really take it seriously.
"The Tragedy of Cory Lanez" by Tochi Onyebuchi (Coriolanus) - 2 stars This one is probably better than I'm giving it credit for. Cameron Marcus, known by stage name Cory Lanez, is a rapper who was recently stabbed to death; this story tackles family, sexuality, and LA gang violence. Unfortunately it's also told as an oral history, and it's that format that I couldn't really get past--I don't think it works at all in short story form; the author hasn't earned the reader's investment in the character that we're mourning and the result is tedium. Which is kind of fitting for Coriolanus to be fair.
"Elsinore" by Patrice Caldwell (Hamlet) - 3 stars Hamlet retold as a penny dreadful--we're in Victorian England, and Claudius is a vampire. Anne (Hamlet) and Camilla (Ophelia) team up to take him down. This will work for a lot of readers better than it worked for me, it simply wasn't to my taste.
"Out of the Storm" by Joy McCullough (King Lear) - 1 star Oh boy, HERE WE GO. I was already approaching this with trepidation after despising McCullough's bestselling Blood Water Paint, but I think my mind was as open as it could have been under the circumstances. Anyway, I remain unconvinced that McCullough has read anything more than the wikipedia summary for Lear as this really failed to engage with it on... any level deeper than 'three sisters whose names start with G, R, C.' Written like a play script, it's a snapshot piece where we see Gabi and Cora at their dying father's bedside at the hospital; Rowan, the middle daughter, bursts in and we discover that she's absented herself from the family to get out from under their strict minister father's thumb. Arguments ensue; Rowan is accused of being selfish, she retaliates that she had the fortitude to escape, etc., that kind of thing. Look, I'm sympathetic to the fact that Lear is one of the hardest plays to retell and I'm happy for a reimagining to be nonliteral, as long as it accesses some of the original play's themes, which this just didn't, at all. Ample meditation on truth, power, aging, justice, human nature, and cosmic inevitability to draw from and you opt for... three sisters with an over-controlling father? (The play script format was insufferable as well; if this were a real play it would be peak 'family arguing at the dinner table' theatre.)
"We Fail" by Samantha Mabry (Macbeth) - 1 star Just dreadful. Drea, a high school senior, has recently suffered a miscarriage, and her fiancé, Mateo, has been passed over for a football scholarship. When the two get in a car crash and their friend Duncan is pinned beneath the car, Drea convinces Mateo to wait before calling for help, so Duncan will die and Mateo can take his scholarship; and also because she's still mourning the loss of her child and needs to take control of their future. I really despise Macbeth retellings that have a hyperfixation on Lady Macbeth's fertility, and for that narrative to be given to a high schooler made it all the more perplexing and oddly melodramatic in a way that didn't show a similar self-awareness as the Romeo and Juliet story. This was too rushed as well; maybe it could have done something interesting as a longer story, but hurtling through the events of Macbeth at breakneck speed just didn't work.
Late Romance
"Lost Girl" by Melissa Bashardoust (The Winter's Tale) - 4 stars This was a lovely story about Perdita who recently discovered the identity of her absent father, trying to cope with that as her new relationship with classics student Zal blossoms. It's short and sweet and a nice note to end on.
Thank you to Netgalley and Flatiron for the advanced copy provided in exchange for an honest review....more
The Queens of Innis Lear is a fantasy retelling of King Lear, focusing on the young generation characters (primarily Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, and EdmThe Queens of Innis Lear is a fantasy retelling of King Lear, focusing on the young generation characters (primarily Cordelia, Goneril, Regan, and Edmund) in a fictional kingdom called Innis Lear. It starts off as a faithful adaptation (think Lear but with magic)--the titular King is abdicating the throne, and he makes a shocking choice to split the crown equally between his three daughters, provided that they pass the test he sets out for them: to each declare that they love him more than their sisters. Goneril (Gaela, in Gratton's novel) and Regan (still Regan), manipulative and self-serving, both pass his test, but his youngest and most loyal daughter, Cordelia (Elia), refuses to participate and is banished.
To say I love this play is an understatement (hi, if you're new here, King Lear is my favorite play) and I'm finding it nearly impossible to untangle my thoughts on how I feel about this as a novel from how I feel about it as a retelling, so we're just going to go into an aggressive amount of detail and hope something coherent materializes. Mild spoilers forthcoming (mostly about the narrative roles of the characters within the novel, not about specific plot points).
Tonally and thematically, Tessa Gratton accesses a lot of what makes Lear so special and I found that I mostly enjoyed my reading experience for that alone. I always say that Lear is a simultaneously cosmic and intimate play, concerned both with Nature and human nature, and the way Gratton literalizes these themes into her magic system and her worldbuilding is done tremendously well. The writing too has a rich, indulgent quality that suits the tone of the book; it's slowly paced and thoughtful, which felt appropriate to the story, though I imagine others may get bored early on without a love of Lear driving you forward.
Though, that love of Lear (along with how intimately well I know this play) did end up being a double-edged sword. Gratton had my investment from the very first page without really needing to earn it, and that certainly helped me devour this 600 page book in a little over a week. But on the other hand, I started to become more and more frustrated with the ways in which Gratton engaged with this play.
First is a rather specific annoyance, that luckily only occurred four or five times, but it was jarring enough that I have to mention it. The first half or two thirds of this novel follow the plot of Lear very closely, to the point where entire scenes from the play were acted out in this book. In theory that's not something that bothers me; what does bother me is Gratton taking word-for-word dialogue from the play and modernizing it so I felt like I was reading No Fear Shakespeare.
Here are a couple of direct side-by-side comparisons so you can see what I mean. Gratton's sentences are first, Shakespeare's are second:
"He has always loved Astore rather more than Connley." "I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall."
"Nothing will come from nothing. Try again, daughter." "Nothing can come of nothing. Speak again."
"I cannot heave my heart into my mouth, Father. I love you... as I should love you, being your daughter, and always have. You know this." "Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave/ My heart into my mouth. I love your Majesty/ According to my bond; no more nor less."
"It is only a note from my brother, and I've not finished reading it. What I've read so far makes me think it's not fit for you to see." "I beseech you sir, pardon me. It is a letter from my brother that I have not all o'er-read; and for so much as I have perus'd, I find it not fit for your o'erlooking."
It's this but it would go on for entire conversations. Here’s the thing: this is pointless and distracting and when you go up against Shakespeare on a sentence by sentence level, you’re going to lose every time.
Now, let's get into the characters, because that's where my real problem with this book lies.
I found Gratton's portrayal of the Edmund character (Ban) endlessly frustrating. You could see her bending over backward to humanize Edmund, making these minor, pointless adjustments (Ban being older than his legitimate brother rather than younger, meaning his bastardy is the only thing standing in the way of his inheritance; Gloucester [Errigal] insisting that Edgar [Rory] inherit even after his alleged betrayal of his father) to amp up the reader's sympathy, but frankly, a lot of Edmund's charm was lost in the process. Edmund is my favorite character and I know I'm not alone in holding that opinion: the reason people love Edmund is because of his complexity and contradictions; he's already deeply human in the play and I felt that Gratton flattened that out of him in an attempt to make his transgressions to come from a play of moral purity.
The parallel/inversion between Edmund and Cordelia in the play is fascinating to me--both youngest children, both loved by their fathers, one good, one evil, their fates intertwined in a chilling way. That Gratton chose to explore this connection was an exciting choice for me, but I felt that turning it into a romance added nothing, and in fact lost quite a bit, especially when it came at the narrative expense of what I think a lot of readers find to be a much more compelling dynamic; that between Ban and Morimaros (the King of France figure). (That's another thing. This book had every opportunity to be explicitly queer, but there were only ever hints and whispers of queerness on the page, which I found frustrating.)
If I were to detail every single character-related annoyance I had we'd be here for a while, so here are some other highlights: I felt that Edgar (Rory) was underutilized and misrepresented when he was on the page. Aefa is the single most pointless character I have read in anything, ever, and the fact that her POV chapters weren't cut suggests to me that the editor just gave up. The old generation characters were all incredibly one-note; if you want to write a retelling focusing on the younger generation, that's fine, but King Lear himself shouldn't need to have a POV chapter to be a complex and interesting character.
But we're getting rather nitpicky now so let's zoom back out. This book was marketed as a "feminist King Lear retelling" and a word that I've seen a lot of people use to talk about it is "subversive." But my issue is that it was not, at all. As I mentioned above, the first half of the book follows Lear with dogged faithfulness, and after that, things start to go off the rails. Which is fine, fun, exactly what I'm here for! If I wanted to read King Lear I'd just read King Lear. But when Gratton started taking control of the narrative, her choices, to me, started to become more and more unwieldy. Nothing she did felt to me like a direct, deliberate subversion of the play; it felt like she had more interest in telling her own story with these characters than doing so as a means to engage with the original text, and that's something that I think makes for an unsuccessful retelling. I don't think you need to have complete and utter reverence for the original, but I think a love for the play coupled with a clear vision for how to engage with it is necessary. I felt--especially after reading an interview with Gratton--that her aim here was as nebulous as 'King Lear but with better female characters', and as a staunch Lear fan, I was rooting for this book but it really let me down in the end.
But I will end on a positive note (sort of): while I felt that Elia was as stiff and uninteresting as cardboard, I thought Gratton succeeded in doing some very interesting things with Gaela and Regan; Gaela particularly. The ways in which Gratton played with gender in Gaela's chapters were dynamic and exciting and I think that along with the aforementioned magic system, Gaela's character is this novel's primary strength.
This is already the longest review I've written in ages and I'm not sure how to end it. Bottom line, do I recommend this book? While I appreciate you sticking with me for this long, probably in hopes of me answering that question, I'm sorry to say that I really don't know. I think you should be interested in Lear but not loveLear, maybe that's the key to unlocking the optimal reading experience. ...more
A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan A Thousand Acres is King Lear meets twentieth-century midwestern farming; oddly enough, a thematic match made in heaven, the mores of the small Iowan community so richly detailed that the stakes effortlessly mirror medieval English court life. It's told through the eyes of Ginny, the eldest daughter and Goneril figure, who lives on their father's thousand acre farm with her husband in a house adjacent to her sister Rose's (Regan)--the youngest sister, Caroline (Cordelia) has moved away and works as a lawyer. When their aging father announces his retirement and intention to turn the farm over to his three daughters, Caroline admits skepticism and is turned away; Ginny and Rose are then left to battle his cruelty and deterioration into drunkenness while keeping the farm afloat.
While the premise sounds literally transposed from the Shakespeare play, enough details are reinvented to assure the reader that literality is not Smiley's intention. Rose has cancer, and she has two daughters; Ginny has had five miscarriages and desperately wants a child; Loren (Edgar), in my opinion one of the smartest characters in the original play, is here an afterthought and a bit of a sycophantic idiot; Pete (Cornwall) is a recovering abusive husband, his relationship with Rose unhappy and volatile, while Ginny's marriage to Ty (Albany) is placid in comparison; the Fool is omitted; Jess (Edmund) is not a scheming mastermind, but instead an unmoored drifter whose interruption of Ginny's life is unplanned, haphazard.
And as someone who's read King Lear about a million times and has spent countless hours thinking about these characters, if I am actively choosing to spend my time reading King Lear retellings, I can't allow myself to get mired in the details, or else reading retellings just becomes a self-defeating exercise. Half of what I just wrote, what Smiley decided to do with these characters, I don't agree with; it doesn't fit my own idea of what a picture-perfect retelling should look like. So I'm much less interested in the details and more interested in the author's vision, in the ways in which they interact with the original play even--especially--when they choose to deviate. This is where The Queens of Innis Lear, a high fantasy Lear retelling, fell spectacularly short for me, and this is where Smiley succeeded.
Each of Smiley's characters is tremendously well-drawn, none more-so than the narrator Ginny. Ginny is obedient and self-effacing, the modest counterpart to her sister Rose who blows through the story like a hurricane. The dynamic between these two sisters, united against the obdurate front that is their father, yet more severed than either of them realizes, is what makes this book so memorable and horribly devastating. This is a bleak, stark, humorless work, which accesses the tragic inevitability of the original play and refocuses it. This isn't the tragedy of Lear as much as it is the tragedy of Goneril, the long-suffering eldest daughter, and in turning this into Ginny's story, part of the cosmic scale is lost, but the calamity and the creeping dread is recaptured on a smaller, more intimate scale. This is an engrossing, quietly devastating book that deftly examines power, corruption, and betrayal through a melancholic, reflective lens, and I found the result both beautiful and heart-rending.
I prefer to write my reviews without spoilers, but in this case, the spoiler is also a huge trigger, so I do want to talk about that before we go. (view spoiler)[Trigger warning for sexual assault of a minor. The reveal that the Lear figure had raped Ginny and Rose when they were teenagers didn't sit well with me at first; for one thing, I tend to take the opinion that books should not introduce sexual assault as a plot point if sexual assault is not their primary focus; for another, it felt to me like a lazy shortcut to giving Ginny and Rose permission to defy their father, an unnecessary addition when the justification for their behavior is already built into the framework of the story. What I did find interesting, though, was how this related to Ginny and Rose's relationship to Caroline; it was refreshing to see a Lear retelling finally do something interesting with Cordelia, turning her from the archetype of the perfect woman to a stubborn, ungrateful child, choosing not to see the full picture of what Ginny and Rose shielded her from. There's a line toward the end where Ginny is about to tell Caroline the full truth, and Caroline turns away and refuses to hear it; there's an acknowledgement that truth can't be delivered without it being asked for, a shocking subversion from Cordelia's role in the original play that I found tremendously effective. (hide spoiler)]...more
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