Difficult to follow. I was interested for about the first 50 pages and then I was completely lost. Too many stories happening at once. ( )

While flawed, this book is flawed at the highest level. There were bits and pieces I didn't like or that I didn't think worked, but I mean that in the same sense one might talk about something like 'Shakespeare's lesser works': the worst one is still right on the money. With this qualification in mind, here's my review:

This is a beautiful book. If you read it, you will be moved. Promise.*



*One further qualification. There's a lot of sexual content in the book, which I know that some people can find distracting. I would only point out that it is all presented, and I mean literally every instance, in an emotional context. The respective passages are not pornographic, anatomical descriptions of who does what to whom, but rather who does what and why.
( )

2.75 The prose is well made and often beautiful, but as a whole this book was simultaneously too much and too little for me. The (too) many characters were given overly equitable, confusingly similar back-stories and the end was unbalancingly abrupt. I'm not sure this is quite readable if one is unfamiliar with [b:A Midsummer Night's Dream|14350|A Midsummer Night's Dream (The Pelican Shakespeare)|William Shakespeare|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166590814s/14350.jpg|894834], and if one is this book is unnecessary. Worth it for Titania. ( )

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. ( )

In this retelling of Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream Titania, queen of the fairies, has been immobilized with inconsolable grief over the death of her changeling son. Her grief is so great that she has become estranged from her husband, Oberon, and, in her despair, she has unleashed Puck, the only creature who almost bested Titania in combat. While these events are occurring under the hill, three lonely, lovelorn humans have chosen to take a shortcut through San Francisco's Buena Vista Park, only to become entrapped within its boundaries, which includes Oberon and Titiania's realm.

I was drawn to this book because A Midsummer's Night Dream is one of my favorite Shakespeare's play. I found the fantasy in this urban fantasy more like magical realism, which I enjoy. However, the number of characters in this story was difficult to track made only more confusing with the various back stories of the humans and a troupe of homeless actors in the park rehearsing a musical based on the science fiction movie, Soylent Green ("Soylent Green is people!"). I frequently found my mind in its own midsummer's night dream. ( )