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lizshayne 's review for:

The Death I Gave Him by Em X. Liu
3.5
challenging dark sad medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven: Plot
Strong character development: Complicated
Loveable characters: No
Diverse cast of characters: Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

The great thing about this book is that the tagline - Something is rotten in Elsinore Labs" - perfectly sets your expectation for the kind of book that you are going to read. It's a weird scifi retelling of Hamlet that weirdly scifis all of the themes of the original:
Horatio is now a somewhat omniscient AI in his role as observer to the debacle.
The specter of death that haunts the original is now explicit in the specter of immortality.
Hamlet/Hayden is still a dumbass, no technology can fix that.
Ophelia/Felicia is AWESOME which is a great update, no notes.
(Ophelia is basically the Susan Pevensie of Shakespeare's canon. Everyone agrees she deserved better.)
This book was weird, but such a crunchy and interesting weird. It took a while for me to get into and I was always sort of wondering at the author's choices as a did, but Liu did a really good job using the skeleton of Hamlet to do really interesting things.