Review: The Heart’s Invisible Furies John Boyne Hogarth 2017 All the fabulous reviews already out there combined with the endorsements on the back cover had my hopes set really high for this book. I picked it up and began reading. Only problem it wasn’t long before I realized this book was not for me. The characters didn’t interest me, and in fact I found them boring. A clueless kid in an odd adoptive home meets a precocious seven-year-old kid and they compare their anatomical attributes. OK, kids do that. I’ll read on and sure enough as time goes on the book became more saturated with other exploits of equal interest. Still I give it one more try and now everyone, everywhere converses only and ever in terms of sexual practices. I’m done with the book at that point. One last look and I read the last few pages. A shame the rest of the book wasn’t written as well as those few pages. I could...
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Review: The Gap of Time Jeanette Winterson Hogarth Shakespeare 2015 Another of the novelized retelling of a Shakespear's work from Hogarth. This one comes from The Winter’s Tale in which Shakespeare depicted jealousy with its attendant emotions and consequences. It’s been called a tragicomedy i.e. bad stuff happens, but it still ends happy. The audiences then as now did not like unhappy, the bad guy wins endings. Justice and repentance must prevail. And it does. That’s a spoiler, but one that should be no surprise. Winterson worked her novelized version from the interior of the jealous husband’s mind. She does that portrayal well. The guy is disgusting and deserves to come to a bad end. He doesn’t though, just as Shakespeare wrote his play. Now comes the part Shakespeare did not do. The language the author chose to use throughout a large portion of this work is as crass as it can get....
Review: Vinegar Girl Anne Tyler Hogarth 2016 Vinegar Girl adds to the list of Shakespeare’s plays retold for current Western audiences that Hogarth has produced. A time line for this project can be found here. http://crownpublishing.com/hogarth-shakespeare/ Anne Tyler has tackled The Taming of the Shrew . That Shakespearian comedy has come under rather severe criticism recently for the portrayal of “taming” in ways that are not at all considered amusing by many women in today’s marketplace. Given that sentiment Tyler had to blaze a trail that departs significantly from the one Shakespeare trod. Not an easy task since much of the original depends outrageous situations and dialogues, and a setup that takes advantage of a man who could be understood by today’s reader as an individual trapped in an addictive behavior needing help, not ridicule. I’ll probably be a minority opinion, but I think that this book failed, and not from the lack of...