Laura

Surprising, because I have read 4 other books by Leigh Bardugo and enjoyed all of them quite a bit. But I found this pretty boring and cliché. At least it was a quick read.

I love sci fi, and I love Hamlet, so I was really hoping/expecting to like this. But it was just...annoying. There were good aspects but those were mostly the moments where the characters' internal monologues felt most directly lifted from Hamlet. I kept thinking “this would be better if it was more like Hamlet.” Because despite drawing from a source with very nuanced and deep characters, the characters in this felt flat. Their motivations didn't really make sense, and often the reasons they didn't make sense were because of keeping some aspects of the source material and discarding others. For example, in the play Hamlet kills R&G at least in part because he feels they have betrayed him. But in this adaptation, he never really had any connection to their stand-in character so his killing of that character makes no real sense. Also his whole motivation for revenge on his uncle makes way less sense in a modern academic/research context. These are not members of a royal family constantly embroiled in bloody wars and conflicts. These are researchers. It just didn't feel believable that he'd jump so quickly to murder.

The “action” scenes are all chaotic in a way that makes them really hard to follow, and sometimes have continuity errors? I.e. a character drops her gun on the ground dramatically and then in the very next scene is “still holding her gun.” Also the way it is narrated from multiple points of view does not really work as it is really repetitive. We just don't need to hear the same info from multiple perspectives... it also felt like half of this book was just the characters running around to different-but-for-all-intents-and-purposes-identical rooms, getting blood on the floor, and knocking things over. For a “locked room mystery” they sure did spend a lot of time switching rooms for no reason.

I've also seen other people commenting that it doesn't make sense to write a mystery based on Hamlet because we already know what happens/who the killer is/etc. And that's a good point. But I think it's even more than that, because some of the major plot points in Hamlet are not used in this, so I found myself wondering/anticipating how they were going to handle this or that plot point...and then said plot point would just simply not occur. Meanwhile, others felt shoehorned in.

Also, yes it is cool that the author decided to make the Ophelia stand-in character have more screen time than Ophelia does but did she have to be so annoying and obtuse? I saw another review saying she seemed like a really generic girlboss character and I so agree. Original Ophelia was cleverer and more interesting, she just had the unfortunate luck to be living in the 1600s (or whenever we think Hamlet takes place). It sort of felt like the author did not understand the character of Ophelia, and the ways that in the source material she is explicitly subversive and calls others out on their hypocrisy. Yes, she lacks agency and that is something that a modern retelling could play with. But they didn't even try to use the interesting aspects of the original character (of which there are many) to base her new version on (and they did do this reasonably well with the other characters).

Safe to say the Lion King is still the best genre-shifted Hamlet adaptation

While this book was enjoyable, in particular in it's vivid descriptions of the planet Perelandra, and in the use of clever/entertaining metaphors as different kinds of life try to understand one another, I liked it significantly less than the first book in the series. It is far more directly allegorical, and while this did not turn me off of it (a lot of the theological discussions were very interesting), it made the plot feel quite predictable. Only in the final ending scene does the writing/plot get a bit lost in wordy theological discussion. An enjoyable read, but less exciting than the first book in the series (Out of the Silent Planet), which I would definitely recommend.