I finished this book because I was curious how things would tie together, but wanted to stop reading so many times. The story itself was interesting (though much of that credit goes to Shakespeare) and the plot twisted enough that you probably wouldn’t guess everything even if you’d read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But the writing was convoluted and in many places the language was outdated and offensive, even for 2011. Hard to read, not sure it was worth it to finish.

A rich, enchanting tale equally as fantastical as it is realistic, as beautiful as it is terrible. Quite a novel.

This is the strangest book I have ever read. It is not for the sensitive reader as it is pervasively sexual and crass. Chris Adrian is an excellent writer; the weaving of characters and story is genius. I appreciated what I perceived to be the point of the story and was glad I read to the end despite many thoughts of abandoning the book. It was helpful for me to do some research on the author; an interview with NPR was particularly enlightening. That said, I cannot wholeheartedly recommend without personally knowing the potential reader.

Brilliant and complicated and well-woven. I read it in a couple of days and loved every moment. Incredibly sad.

There was a lot of good in this book. The excerpt that had been in the New Yorker was good. The premise was good. The storyline following Titania and Oberon had a lot of promise. But ultimately there were so many storylines to follow, and they didn't work together as well as they should have, so it ended up a disjointed one of those convergence-because-we're-all-interconnected stories, instead of a cool, surreal, modern retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I really wanted to love this, and I just liked it.

I give the fuck up. I strongly disliked the book as a whole, but the whole cougar/teenage boy salad tossing/queefing scene made me want to throw my Kindle across the room.

This book is dreary and tedious as fuck. The scenes with Titania and her court were by far the most interesting parts; I even liked Demon Puck! The humans are just horrible and their stories were so dull and repetitive.

I get the sense that Adrian, in an attempt to make this a truly unique spin on Shakespeare, confused "spin" with "subversion". What you get is not really subversive -- it's more a weak attempt at what Adrian thinks might be inflammatory. Molly "rebelling" against her wacko "Christian" family by falsely accusing her black foster brother of rape is not so much creatively subversive as it is out-and-out offensive. The aforementioned queefing scene and the descriptions of marshmallow genitalia were just stupid.
Molly, Henry, and Will reminiscing about their lost loves were sweet and a refreshing change from the overall bleakness of the story.

Ultimately, I honestly don't think Adrian is as creative or as enchanting a writer as he thinks he is. I want my $9.99 back.

This book was like a rollercoaster for me. I was really liking it and involved, and then it was weird, and then it was great again. And then at the end it felt like a big mess. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for something that felt so untidy.

This was okay, but not at all what I expected. The jacket flap calls it a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but the term "retelling" is pretty loosely applied here. It is a story of the human and fairy worlds colliding on the night of the solstice, and Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the rude mechanicals are present, but that's about as far as the similarities go. About halfway in, I was starting to get frustrated that the story was still slogging through the human characters' backstories and no one was running around falling mistakenly in love with anyone else. Still, Adrian does a good job ultimately weaving together the details he spends so much time laying out.

This book does one amazing, 5 star thing for me - it goes to battle against grief using whimsy as a weapon. Not surprising though, coming from an author who is a pediatric oncologist. Many years ago, I spent quite a bit of time in this hospital ward, when my friend's child developed brain cancer. The ward did battle in the same way, with its bright colors, toys, posters, games, glitter, face paint, etc.

But while grief underpins the book, the story itself is a magical romp, drawing on elements from A Midsummer Night's Dream. It isn't a retelling of Shakespeare - although it did get nearly as convoluted in parts. There are fairies, magic, Peter Pan-like lost boys, a play within a play (Soylent Green!), and three lovelorn adults who are each lost in their own way. And there's lots of fairy sex :)

The only thing that kept me from rating this book higher was the need for tighter editing, especially when it came to wandering in the park/forest. I think it would also have benefitted from more breaks in the layout - there were too many pages of dense text, barely broken by paragraphs or dialogue. I think by the end I was feeling a bit exhausted and less able to make connections between story threads and characters.