In this phantasmagorical tale, Chris Adrian reshaped “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” into a mammoth, messy, tilted, erotic, meandering reimagining of Shakespeare’s comedy into an elaborate feast of faeries and monsters, Lilliputians and giants, demons and derelicts, heart-broken humans and a group of outspoken homeless people who are staging a musical reenactment of SOYLENT GREEN. And that is just a segment of the odd and atavistic population of characters that you will meet in this multiple narrat...

Chris Adrian had a great premise: take A Midsummer Night’s Dream and transplant it to San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, people it with three heartbroken losers and a host of fairies, and see what happens. I can’t quite put my finger on why it completely doesn’t work. The intersecting backstories of the three characters – particularly Molly, who grew up in a large family of Jesus freak musicians and is haunted by a brief sexual encounter with her black foster brother Peabo – are fairly interestin...

Sorrowful, strange and beautiful.

~*~For this review and others, visit the EditorialEyes Blog.~*~4 out of 5Something is gloriously, tragically amiss in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park. In fact, to mix my Shakespeare quotes, something wicked this way comes. It’s also something strange and chaotic and deeply human.In Chris Adrian’s The Great Night, the faerie court of Titania and Oberon are celebrating another Midsummer Night, many moons after the events of Shakespeare’s play—though “celebrating” is not exactly the right word. Af...

The Great Night is a wonderfully strange trip of a novel. Though it is drenched in magic and the fantastic it is often pulled down into the mundane world where it becomes another enthralling but ultimately useless curiosity and distraction. Frequently startling and dark in equal measure it draws the reader into its world for one night through offering a glimpse into the range of characters who are grounded and familiar but still somewhat surreal. While the fantastic and magic are the elements th...

Sometimes a book has a beautiful story at its core, but the thread tends to get lost in overcomplication. That's the way I felt about Chris Adrian's The Great Night, a well-written book that meshes the emotional, relationship-driven crises of three San Franciscans with characters from A Midsummer Night's Dream, with mixed results. It's Midsummer Eve in 2008. Three strangers, each dealing with the wreckage of a relationship, enter Balboa Park, headed to the same party. But unbeknownst to them, Ti...

I really can't resist a mostly realist book with supernatural elements. After finishing a book like this, I walk around for days wishing it was real. I have a long history of secretly desiring magical explanations for the most mundane of things. Don't you want to live in a world where, instead of casually explaining to people that the reason you are humming "Call Me Maybe" is because you must have heard it in the background somewhere, the real reason is because the Bird Prince of the Hills neede...

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 f...

The Great Night is one of those rare books that I’m impossibly grateful to have found. A modern reworking of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is conceptually daring, stylistically exciting and presents a view of humanity that is stark and powerful and unlike anything I’ve read before.It is Midsummer’s Eve in San Francisco’s Buena Vista Park, where Oberon, Titania and their faerie kingdom have set up court. But the Great Night celebrations do not go quite as planned. Unable to deal wit...

A startlingly strange, rich novel that has repeatedly been described as a retelling of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but is something more interesting — an original story that borrows some of the characters and a couple of plot twists. This is top-flight literary fantasy, a Neil Gaiman-esque story about myths and magic and how they intersect with the real world. The prose is lyrical and beautiful, and the scenarios Adrian comes up with to background his mortal characters — a woman whose family fo...

This was a case of two pretty good books that got combined. The whole was less than its parts. Kind of a mess.

In this book, Chris Adrian writes a modern day take on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I have never read the play. I have seen it performed a couple of times, but will have to read the play to better appreciate the connections. In consequence, my review reflects only tale that Adrian has written. It is Midsummer Night, which is supposidly a night for a great party, but Titania is still overwhelmed by grief -- grief for the loss of her changelling son and for her husband Oberon who she d...

This book takes place here:My parents used to take me to this park as a kid -- not often, it was farther away than the Panhandle. As a little urban child I thought it was like the real forest. And it is the real forest, in The Great Night, the forest that is endless, and dangerous, and beautiful, the forest where you lose your way and find yourself -- or a horde of crazy fairies, or some bums putting on a play of Soylent Green, or some other heartbroken souls lost on their ways to a party none o...

I admit I was a little worried that "The Great Night" wouldn't be in the same league with Chris Adrian's other two novels, "Gob's Grief" (nearly great) and "The Children's Hospital" (stone-cold great). Tepid ratings on Goodreads, for instance, coupled with what seemed to me to be a plot description fraught with potential peril gave me pause. Here's the pitch: a modern-day re-imagining of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream," set in San Francisco, featuring faeries from the play, faerie quee...

I give the fuck up. I strongly disliked the book as a whole, but the whole cougar/teenage boy salad tossing/queefing scene made me want to throw my Kindle across the room. This book is dreary and tedious as fuck. The scenes with Titania and her court were by far the most interesting parts; I even liked Demon Puck! The humans are just horrible and their stories were so dull and repetitive. I get the sense that Adrian, in an attempt to make this a truly unique spin on Shakespeare, confused "spin"

Jesus, this took me forever. I have my reasons, but the upshot is that it was really hard for me to keep this all together, because it's a crazy sprawl. I'm not sure how much of it was my general distractedness, but honestly I think he was trying to do way way way too much here, with too many characters and too much backstory, especially since it was all scrimmed over with fantastical and evil faeries and a retooling of Midsummer Night's Dream. I didn't dislike it, but I definitely got lost a lo...

Sometimes a book makes me feel utterly inadequate as a reader, and this was one of them. It is undoubtedly clever, imaginative and original, but for me much of it made little sense, perhaps because I have never studied A Midsummer Night's Dream and knew nothing whatsoever about the dystopian fantasy film Soylent Green, which is another major influence and is discussed several times. Perhaps the problem is that without the grounding in Shakespeare, any attempt to transplant one of his more nonsen...

This book is literally a clusterfuck; as in, people and faeries are clustered together. Fucking. They are also masturbating, having sex with trees, spying on people masturbating, and spying on people masturbating on trees.Well, I see that you're kerflummoxed as to why I gave this book a lowly three stars. Truthfully, I was thinking two until the tree sex scene. So anyway, what is going on in this beautiful disaster of a mind f-ing? A bunch of heartbroken, lonely ass people stumble into Buena Vis...

Basically, Chris Adrian ranks in my personal pantheon of author rockstars. I love people who write this way - both beautifully, on a sentence by sentence level, and with elements of the unreal incorporated in the text. I had about ten years of reading books set exclusively in naturalistic universes, and honestly, I've come to the conclusion that the universe, even the one we know and see and accept as unmagical, IS rich and strange and unlikely. I appreciate Adrian's work, because he seems to fe...

The Great Night is another Midsummer Night's Dream with Titania playing the greater role along with three mortals who get trapped in the garden with her and a bunch of fairies just after she's released Puck from being bound. Each of the mortals brings his/her own issues. One was taken in as a boy and thrown out again without memory of it. It's an interesting retelling, one that was hard for me to track for a good bit of it because the story switches from one or other of the main characters to an...