A growing ensemble cast lends levity and warmth to a captivating reading of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies.
Neill’s speculative Shakespeare remix invites characters from other plays to chime in on representation in Much Ado About Nothing.
The author’s Post Apocalyptic Space Shakespeare series follows Janine, a high-tech future civilization’s personality construct, who’s been tasked with exploring the strange new worlds of Shakespeare’s plays. She sometimes invites characters who die or disappear to leave their plays and join her travels. Among others, Janine and Ophelia, Rosalind, Viola, Othello, Falstaff, and even playwright Christopher Marlowe now live on a spaceship and visit other of the Bard’s works together as side characters. They must work as a team to leave major dramatic events intact while foiling their common enemy, Iago, who escaped Othello and seeks to conquer the entire Shakespearean canon. Newcomers to this series may struggle to gather this context, but readers who persevere will be rewarded. The books appealingly introduce lesser-known works alongside popular classics; for example, the volume begins with a remixed trial scene from Henry VI, Part 1 as Janine and the gang swoop in to rescue a condemned Shakespearean Joan of Arc; Marlowe and Shakespeare wrote this version of Joan as a demonic sorceress, which comes to the heroes’ attention after they’ve brought her aboard. The contrast between the play character and her real-life identity sends her into painful internal conflict regarding her “true” self. The theme of gendered power in Joan’s story dovetails nicely with Hero’s disgrace in Much Ado About Nothing. The latter story strikes a chord with other members of the cast as well: Ophelia despairs at seeing Hero rejected at the altar, and Othello notes that Don John’s deceptive undermining is “unwelcomely familiar.” Explanatory side comments, madcap hijinks, and an action-packed ending (leaving essential Much Ado events unchanged) should entice reluctant Shakespeare readers. Smart thematic connections and Neill’s dialogue will charm Shakespeare scholars with Othello’s sincere-but-suave encouragement of his female friends and Joan’s evangelism for French wine and cheese, all of which offers humor and warmth. Janine, Othello, Rosalind, Ophelia, and Viola all develop friendships with one another, continually raising the stakes.
A growing ensemble cast lends levity and warmth to a captivating reading of one of Shakespeare’s most beloved comedies.Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9798252620015
Page Count: 316
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the...
Brown presents the second installment of his epic science-fiction trilogy, and like the first (Red Rising, 2014), it’s chock-full of interpersonal tension, class conflict and violence.
The opening reintroduces us to Darrow au Andromedus, whose wife, Eo, was killed in the first volume. Also known as the Reaper, Darrow is a lancer in the House of Augustus and is still looking for revenge on the Golds, who are both in control and in the ascendant. The novel opens with a galactic war game, seemingly a simulation, but Darrow’s opponent, Karnus au Bellona, makes it very real when he rams Darrow’s ship and causes a large number of fatalities. In the main narrative thread, Darrow has infiltrated the Golds and continues to seek ways to subvert their oppressive and dominant culture. The world Brown creates here is both dense and densely populated, with a curious amalgam of the classical, the medieval and the futuristic. Characters with names like Cassius, Pliny, Theodora and Nero coexist—sometimes uneasily—with Daxo, Kavax and Sevro. And the characters inhabit a world with a vaguely medieval social hierarchy yet containing futuristic technology such as gravBoots. Amid the chronological murkiness, one thing is clear—Darrow is an assertive hero claiming as a birthright his obligation to fight against oppression: "For seven hundred years we have been enslaved….We have been kept in darkness. But there will come a day when we walk in the light." Stirring—and archetypal—stuff.
Comparisons to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones series are inevitable, for this tale has elements of both—fantasy, the future and quasi-historicism.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-53981-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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