Review: Shakespeare For Squirrels, by Christopher Moore

Rating:

🐿️🐿️🐿️🐿️🐿️

First Response:

Well, I HAVE to read the rest of them now!

One Sentence Summary:

Pocket of Dog-Snogging (a fool) has washed up on the shores of Athens just in time to get mixed up in the events of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream-- but someone has killed Robin Goodfellow (i.e., Puck) and Pocket has to figure out who did it!

Tell Me More:

Apparently, this is the THIRD in a series of Christopher Moore novels based on Shakespeare plays. Libby didn't tell me this when I went to check out the audiobook-- though I should have known something was up when the blurb said Pocket had been "last seen in..." I thought maybe this book was just doing some sort of weird metatextual thing like House of Leaves, telling a story about itself that wasn't entirely true.

That's not what was going on at all. Not a metatextual thing, just an error in the metadata. Lucky for me this book can be read as a standalone.

This book has everything you'd expect from a Shakespeare-inspired work: Lots of dick jokes, lots of scatological humor (i.e., poop and urine jokes, for those (like me) who might have never encountered 'scatological' on their high school vocab tests), and a TON of witty wordplay. I particularly appreciated the way Moore sprinkled Shakespeare's original text into this book while still letting it be it's own thing. Titania's monologue on the Indian boy and Puck's final soliloquy stand out as they are quoted in full (at least, I think they are-- It's been a minute since I read Midsummer), but there are other, smaller quotes from across the Bard's entire repertoire sprinkled in here and there. None of them were footnoted in the audiobook I listened to, so they didn't really hinder the reading experience. If you're a fan of Shakespeare, you'll notice them (and they'll probably make you smile) but if you're not, they won't get in the way.

Then entire time I was reading this book, I couldn't help myself from thinking, "Wow, I wish I'd been able to read this in middle school when I read Midsummer." The plot isn't particularly hard to follow, being a standard hardboiled detective narrative set around the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and I think it would be a great book for any teenager you might want to get interested in Shakespeare. That being said, I can also see the pearl-clutchers fainting in shock at that suggestion. This book plays with Shakespearean language, but it also let's it's characters speak in common parlance-- so it's not unusual for characters to tell each other to "fuck off."

Such is the great duality of Shakespearean literature. The Bard loved a good dick joke, but most of them are in such archaic language that we can't understand them without a footnote. And if we update that sentiment to modern language, it just comes across as crass. I'm not sure why we let our children consume such lowbrow swill!

Anyway, this book was an incredibly fun read. Magical antics, Agatha Christie-an twists, the razor-sharp wit of a Shakespearean fool-- this book was basically perfect for me; and a great relief after the heady gothic novels I started this week with. Honestly, I was kinda excited to find out that this book wasn't a standalone. There are two more days in my work-week, and two more books to be read! I can't wait to meet Pocket as I was supposed to (in Fool) and follow his adventures across the world of Shakespeare's works!