Christopher Moore has quickly become one of those writers where no matter what he writes; I’m going to read it. He’s established himself as a funny guy, that’s undeniable. I’m reading him because he’s clever. Don’t believe me, check his canon. I don’t have time to get into them in this review. (EDITOR’S NOTE: What are you talking about? This is your own blog.) In his latest book, Fool, he does a humorous retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear from the telling of a fool.
Now wait a tic. This sounds A LOT like Alan Gordon’s phenomenal series starting with Thirteenth Night, where the audience follows the fool from Twelfth Night as he solves a mystery. So I was very hesitant going into Fool because of that odd unintentional (?) similarity. Yet luckily Moore is a good enough author to make his book still stand on its own. This ended up playing more like A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum than Gordon’s work. Moore does a great job with playing around with a lot of Shakespeare conventions, especially his jabs at the prophetic witches. Ultimately this novel ended up being one of Moore’s best structured novels and easily among his funniest. I hope he revisits this time period soon.
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