All Night Awake

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Amazon.com ReviewThe adventures of the Elizabethan teacher and poet Will Shakespeare continue in All Night Awake, the sequel to Sarah A. Hoyt's debut novel, Ill Met by Moonlight. Seeking his fortune, young Will has come to London, but his only fate looks to be death, by either starvation or plague. All hope seems lost--then Will meets Kit Marlowe, the most acclaimed playwright of the age. Marlowe offers to help Will find work on the stage, and Will accepts, never dreaming that Marlowe is a treacherous tool of Queen Elizabeth's secret agents. Will believes his fortune has turned--until his Dark Lady, Silver, the ruler of Elvenland, finds him. Believing she seeks only to seduce him away from his wife, Will sends Lady Silver away. He refuses to believe her story that the plague afflicting London is caused by her villainous brother. But Silver speaks the truth. Her brother, the ex-king of Elvenland, seeks vengeance on those who overthrew him: the Lady Silver and her ex-lover, the mortal Will Shakespeare.Like its prequel, All Night Awake is a suspenseful and entertaining fantasy. However, you probably shouldn't read this series if you don't like the idea of Shakespeare as a character in fiction, or if you don't want to see any fantastic explanations of Shakespeare's staggering talent. --Cynthia WardFrom Publishers WeeklyIn this ingenious but plodding historical fantasy, a sequel to Ill Met by Moonlight (2001), in which a young William Shakespeare had to cope with the supernatural, Will has failed to make any mark as a poet, until he is taken up by flamboyantly successful wordsmith Christopher Marlowe. Regrettably, Marlowe is also a frightened secret agent who is desperate enough to save his own neck by implicating naive Will in a fake plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth. In Fairyland, meanwhile, the spirit of the murderous elf Sylvanus, having escaped captivity, heads for London with a plan to reshape reality under his eternal rule. The elf king, Quicksilver ("Silver" when in his female aspect), also races to London, where he tries to get the help of his/her former lovers, Will and Kit, in averting magical disaster-if the parties involved can trust or even listen to each other. A fine plot, however, suffers from flaws in execution. For one thing, the supernatural machinery is unfamiliar enough to require intrusive explanations that seem improvised for the author's convenience. For another, bland presentation undercuts the supposedly dramatic events. In particular, the frequent Shakespearean quotations, spoken here by Marlowe, make an unfortunate contrast with Hoyt's own serviceable but earthbound prose. Writing about both Shakespeare and the supernatural, as Neil Gaiman does so well in his Sandman saga, requires a bit more magic. Fans of the first book, though, won't be disappointed.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.