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Reading: Monstrous Little Voices
Oct. 26th, 2016 06:48 pmI bought this because it was one of the many fascinating-sounding books mentioned during the "Transformative Shakespeare" panel at Nine Worlds this summer. Monstrous Little Voices is a collection of five stories by five different authors inspired by Shakespeare's plays and looking at the lives of his characters after their canon stories have finished. The stories are located in a kind of shared world where all the plays take place together, almost simultaneously, and each one builds on the events of the earlier ones to create a wider arc plot.
The stories themselves were variable. My favorite was Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Even in the Cannon's Mouth", an entertaining romp combining characters from Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It and Twelfth Night and featuring magic, swashbuckling and humour. I also liked Emma Newman's "The Unkindest Cut", a much darker story about prophecies and fate, and Foz Meadows' "Coral Bones" which explores Miranda's life after The Tempest along with much more modern ideas about gender and sexuality. I was less keen on Jonathan Barnes' "The Twelfth Night", which was about (a version of) Shakespeare himself rather than the characters from the plays, and thought that Kate Heartfield's "The Course of True Love" was definitely the weakest of the stories, a fairly unexciting romance with some magical elements.
Overall, it was enjoyable enough to read, though I didn't quite feel that the different stories tied together as neatly as I think they were supposed to, and I might have preferred more separate stories.
The stories themselves were variable. My favorite was Adrian Tchaikovsky's "Even in the Cannon's Mouth", an entertaining romp combining characters from Much Ado About Nothing, All's Well That Ends Well, As You Like It and Twelfth Night and featuring magic, swashbuckling and humour. I also liked Emma Newman's "The Unkindest Cut", a much darker story about prophecies and fate, and Foz Meadows' "Coral Bones" which explores Miranda's life after The Tempest along with much more modern ideas about gender and sexuality. I was less keen on Jonathan Barnes' "The Twelfth Night", which was about (a version of) Shakespeare himself rather than the characters from the plays, and thought that Kate Heartfield's "The Course of True Love" was definitely the weakest of the stories, a fairly unexciting romance with some magical elements.
Overall, it was enjoyable enough to read, though I didn't quite feel that the different stories tied together as neatly as I think they were supposed to, and I might have preferred more separate stories.
