Hag-Seed

Starred review from August 22, 2016
In The Tempest, Prospero is not just exiled king, magician, and father, he’s an impresario staging multiple shows: the storm that strands his enemies on the island; his pretended disdain for Ferdinand, whom he intends for his daughter, Miranda; the play within the play; and, some critics argue, the play itself. In this, the fourth Hogarth Shakespeare adaptation, Atwood underscores these elements by making her Prospero a prominent theater festival director. After being done out of his job by a scheming underling, Felix goes off-grid, teaching literacy and theater to prisoners and grieving a lost daughter. When he learns that the man who took his job, now a political bigwig, will attend the next production, he sees his chance: in this Tempest, it won’t just be Prospero who gets revenge. Former diva Felix is a sly and inventive director and teacher who listens to his cast’s input, and his efforts to shape the play and his plot make for compelling reading. If, at the end, things tie up a little too neatly, the same might be said of the original, and Atwood’s canny remix offers multiple pleasures: seeing the inmates’ takes on their characters, watching Felix make use of the limited resources the prison affords (legal and less so), and marveling at the ways she changes, updates, and parallels the play’s magic, grief, vengeance, and showmanship. 125,000-copy announced first printing.

May 15, 2016

Now that Jeanette Winterson, Howard Jacobson, and Anne Tyler have all had a go at contemporizing Shakespeare via the "Hogarth Shakespeare" series, Man Booker Prize winner Atwood takes on The Tempest. Owing to a scheming assistant, Felix has lost his job as artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival and finds himself in isolated southern Ontario, teaching Literacy Through Theatre to prisoners at the Burgess Correctional Institution. As the Burgess Correctional Players begin videotaping an interactive rendering of The Tempest, Felix's old enemies swing into view and are made participants in vengeful Felix's production. Even Felix's daughter, Miranda, dead for 12 years, has magically chosen to be a part of the proceedings.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2016
Atwood (The Heart Goes Last, 2015) presents a bravura hall-of-mirrors contribution to the delectable Hogarth Shakespeare project in which novelists reimagine Shakespeare's plays. Felix, the famously over-the-top artistic director of a prestigious Canadian theater festival, is forced out by his conspiring assistant just as he's about to produce The Tempest, which he hoped would help him endure his grief over the death of his young daughter, Miranda. Instead this would-be Prospero exiles himself in the countryside in a veritable hovel for 12 lunatic years, sustained by an avidly imagined spirit daughter and dreams of revenge. A teaching position at a prison breaks the spell. As he channels his theatrical genius into inspiring inmates to create wily, streetwise versions of Shakespeare, he slowly steers them toward The Tempest as part of an audacious plan to finally secure his own personal justice. Atwood positively frolics in this rambunctiously plotted and detailed enactment of how relevant Shakespeare can be for a talented troupe behind bars. Supremely sagacious, funny, compassionate, and caustic, Atwood presents a reverberating play-within-a-play within a novel.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 5, 2016
The fourth book in the Hogarth series of contemporary novels based on Shakespeare’s plays is a delightfully complex and inventive modern recreation of The Tempest, in which the character of Prospero is a prominent theater festival director named Felix. Voice actor Thomson adds life to the character of Felix and the plots and fantasies of his fertile imagination. Felix is pushed out of his job by a scheming underling and goes off the grid, teaching literacy and theater to prisoners and grieving a lost daughter. Over time, Felix transforms into the clever and manipulative teacher who organizes a class of convicts to analyze and perform Shakespeare’s Tempest as a means of executing his vengeance. Thomson handles the wild but benevolent humor of Shakespeare’s Tempest and Atwood’s equally well. A Hogarth hardcover.

September 1, 2016

Among the offerings so far in the "Hogarth Shakespeare" series, modern retellings of the plays, Atwood's is distinctive for integrating a juicily conceived rehearsal and performance of the work in question, The Tempest. Persuasively detailing the theater world as she parallels the play's events, the author opens with Felix Phillips, revered artistic director of the Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, losing his post to the machinations of underling Tony. He retreats to a rundown shack, his only company thoughts of his dead daughter, Miranda, which are so substantial she can seem real to him (and us). Nine years later, he answers an ad to teach Literacy Through Literature at the Fletcher County Correctional Institute and begins staging Shakespeare there. The rough-and-tumble inmates favor bloody power struggles like Macbeth, but when Felix learns that loathsome Tony will be visiting with some politician associates, he plans a Tempest that will act as trap and revenge. His actors need some convincing (though everyone wants to play Caliban, the titular hag-seed), but they give a magical performance. VERDICT The play's final rendering might be a bit over the top, but the narrative as a whole is so inventive, heartfelt, and swiftly rendered as to expunge any doubts. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 4/18/16; "Editors' Fall Picks," p. 28.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.