Midsummer's Bottom

So as you may have guessed from the name A Midsummer's bottom is a book about William Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream. Now I have seen A Midsummer's Night Dream but it was many years ago and I remember very little about the actual plot but I'm pleased to say that didn't hinder me from enjoying this book at all. The plot is that the fairies in the play A Midsummer's Night Dream are actually real, and they helped William Shakespeare write the plot of A Midsummer's Night Dream four hundred years ago but in doing so they made a pact with Shakespeare that they must watch every rendition of the play ever made for the rest of eternity. Now after four hundred years these fairies are understandably sick of watching the same play over and over again and want to cause some chaos to ruin it.

Now as you can tell this isn't a very serious plot and it's not like most of the other work Darren Shan/Dash has put out but I'm glad to say it is very funny there were several moments where I actually burst out laughing while reading. A lot of Darren Shan's stuff is quite dark so I was pleasantly surprised to see him do a genre shift into comedy and it work so well. Taking a risk to write something so completely different from all his other work was a huge gamble but it absolutely paid off as this book is fantastic.

So there's a few characters which you follow in this book, the first is Des a self proclaimed anarchist who has no regard for the rules and likes to cause Chaos, and he's been tasked with ruining the play by the fairy Puck. The rest of the characters you follow are from the theatre troop who are producing the play, these are called The Midsummer Players and every year they produce a new rendition of A Midsummers Night Dream, now the problem is these people are really bad actors, everyone who sees the play thinks their rendition is terrible but this doesn't get them down as they do a new rendition every year without hesitation. There's a lot of variety in these characters which I really liked, you have an aspiring actress who's excited about her new role as the lead of the play with dreams of stardom. You've got a gay couple who seem to have a bit of a rocky relationship since one of the men wants a polyamorous relationship but the other doesn't but because he loves him he puts up with his cheating because he doesn't want to lose him. You have a young man who's completely obsessed with the play and since he first saw it he fell in love with absolutely everything about it and there's plenty more but I cant list everyone here.

So the main plot this book follows Des as he infiltrates the group and does everything he can to sabotage the production of this play before it gets shown to a live audience, I wouldn't say Des is the main protagonist though as you do follows all of the Midsummer Players from their perspective so you get to see inside their head and see what they're really thinking. The book is broken down into separate Acts just like an actual play which I thought was a nice touch.

The characters are where this book really shines. At the start I didn't really like the characters so much because they all seemed to have unlikeable traits, but as I read on I realised this was a deliberate choice by the author and these characters aren't meant to be perfect, they make mistakes, they have issues and this makes them feel more human and believable. As you read on with the book you really do get attached to these characters and you're really rooting for the best to happen to them, the initial dislike of these characters is quickly overturned when you get to know their personalities and see how funny and likeable they actually are.

Another group of characters I really enjoyed was the actual Fairy Characters from the original play, now they appear briefly for the most part but their appearances were definitely a highlight since all of their dialogue is written in Rhyme and Iambic Pentameter just like Shakespeare himself . Reading through the fairies talking to each other was always humorous and a pleasant surprise whenever the fairies came back into the plot.

The plot moves along at a nice pace and always has your attention as Des is always trying to cause some chaos as he comes up with scheme after humorous scheme. The ending to this book is absolutely fantastic, all the cast have full character arcs and the climax really brings everything to a head during the finale. Once I got to the final Act of this book I was not able to put it down and once I finished the very last page my first thought was “When can I read the sequel!”

In conclusion, this book is absolutely fantastic, props to Darren Dash for trying something new and it paying off so well. This book is as much as a comedy as it is a drama and I'm glad to say that the execution of both of these genre's was handled spectacularly. I would highly suggest picking this up if you're looking for something relatively light hearted and fun to read, and I am really hoping for a sequel some time In the future!