Hag-Seed

"Margaret Atwood’s best books delve deep into her characters’ souls, but her funniest work is faster and broader. Her retelling of The Tempest is the latter: a modern farce that casts a small-town theater director as Prospero and the local bureaucrats as his usurpers. Atwood taps into The Tempest’s rage and grief and finds unsettling analogues for Miranda and Ariel that waver between realism and fantasy. But the book’s meta humor is its lifeline. Atwood blurs the lines between the director’s life and his art, turning the book into a simultaneous meditation on mourning and a lively, silly trip down the rabbit hole."