Fool: A Novel51FEd7AiGxL. SL500  Fool by Christopher Moore   Review by Christopher Moore

As much as I love Christopher Moore’s books, there were some reservations with this one. Both my wife and a close friend – confirmed Moore fanatics – started the book only to leave it after about 40 pages saying it was “meh”. Being a huge Shakespeare nut, I was looking forward to it, but the “meh” lingered in the front of my mind as I opened the book.

Shame on me for buying into the “meh” – Fool is a wonderfully ribald take on Shakespeare’s King Lear, told from the King’s fool’s perspective, and slightly (okay – mightily) amended to incorporate Moore’s gift for slapstick, bawdy humor. There’s dashes of other plays in here – the witches of MacBeth, a ghost in the vein of Hamlet – but the point of Fool isn’t to adhere to the bones of the play, but to delight in the melodrama and plot intricacies that made the Bard so much fun, and subvert it by transforming it into a classic Christopher Moore story.

Nun shagging, love potions, ghost shagging, poisons, princess shagging…you get the picture. Typical Moore goodness, and nothing to shy away from.

via Unbound!: Fool – Christopher Moore.

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