A MID-SEMESTER NIGHT’S DREAM
by Margaret Meacham
William Shakespeare’s magical love mix-up, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, becomes an essentially un-enchanting send-up for middle-graders in this contemporary, hi-lo reader interpretation. Recast in the lead is motherless Morgan, a typical pre-teen crushing on classmate Ben. Her single father, meanwhile, seems smitten with the stuffy Louise, leaving Morgan to seek motherly counsel from the mom of her best friend, Sam. The stiffly told story plods along dully, even when a fairy-in-training suddenly appears in Morgan’s dollhouse to lend a helping wand. This lack of literary magic is perplexing until a sitcom-worthy sequence of mishaps builds momentum for the climactic school-dance scene. But again, the anti-climactic final chapters suffer from over-explanation, awkward prose, and a missing charm that plagues the first half like the goofed-up love spells plaguing the fictional romances. (Fiction. 10-13)