One of the ideas that has been kicking around my head for a few years now is a modern retelling of MacBeth that would either be a young adult novel or a screenplay, but I don’t think it’s ever gotten any further than a few scribbled notes here and there. Alan Gratz apparently beat me to the punch as his sequel to Something Rotten is Something Wicked, a retelling of the Scottish Play.
Something Rotten was the audiobook that kept me company over the past week, and if you hadn’t already figured it out, it is a retelling of Hamlet. I majored in English in college. So, I read Hamlet. A lot. Roughly once a semester, I believe. Something Rotten is a pretty cool Shakespeare retelling.
Horatio is a wise-beyond-his-years narrator and amateur detective who is a basically a teenage Philip Marlowe. He exudes cool and individuality. The other characters with slight name changes from their Shakespearean predecessors tend to be a little more one-dimensional. Still, I can see the book being a hit with teen boys, and being a nice jumping off point for high school teachers hoping to introduce Shakespeare to their students.
The book is actually very good, but there is one problem. It is billed in more than one place on the cover of my audio as a mystery, and certainly the style is that of a mystery, with one key problem. There is no mystery. There is a sort of half-hearted attempt to introduce a few other suspects, but these possibilities amount to nothing. I read a fair amount of mysteries, and the general idea is that there should be twists, turns and surprises, but that never really happens in Something Rotten. So, it’s a good book, but if you are a mystery reader and looking for a good mystery, this isn’t it.
There was lots to like about this book, though. The dark humor is fun, and should go over well with the young adult audience. I personally appreciated the They Might Be Giants reference. (I had to stop typing the previous paragraph when “The Sun is a Mass of Incandescent Gas” came up on the Ipod.) There was also a fun reference to Shakespeare ripoffs.
Ok, have to go now because Mammal just came up on the Ipod.
My Books
