Bingo 3: Fanfic
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Weird Sisters is a re-imagining of Shakespeare’s Macbeth; it’s definitely fanfic, both in that it’s a self-insertion into an established world/story and that it’s loaded with basically Easter Eggs that only a fan of the original would appreciate. The premise is that Shona McMonagle is a middle-aged librarian who is somehow capable of time-travel. The time travel thing is not really explained, and it doesn’t really matter as that’s not the point. When Shona was younger, she attended the Marcia Blaine School for Girls, and there her now mentor/handler (?) Ms. Blaine. This is also apparently when she discovered her time travel ability (which is somehow related to Ms. Blaine). Anyways, Shona has this meeting with the Founder (that’s Ms. Blaine) who wants her to alter all copies of Shakespeare’s Macbeth (this includes anthologies) with a disclaimer: “The story, characters and incidents portrayed herein are fictitious. No identifications with actual persons (living or deceased), places and buildings is intended or should be inferred.”
But instead of this, Shona ends up going back in time to the 11th century to stop Lord and Lady Macbeth from killing king Duncan. She gets turned into a mouse for a while, meets a talking cat Frank (who like many outdoor cats has several homes/identities, but he says he prefers Frank (as opposed to Hemlock or Spot), and ends up as Macbeth’s fool to provide the entertainment for Duncan’s impending visit. Both Lord and Lady Macbeth both are and are not like their Shakespearean counterparts, and both have siblings who are a part of this story, although really only one sibling group is part of the play. The weird sisters of the title play a role, although one of them, the youngest who seems to think, thanks to her sisters, that she’s not a very good witch; she’s really bad at trochaic tetrameter for one thing, and this apparently is a sign of being a proper witch. The humor is of the sort that the three sisters together are Ina, Mina, and Mo; get it?
There are plenty of other silly bits that require at least a little knowledge of Shakespeare, including what “Frank” ends up being short for, the explanation for the porter parts of the play (I never did quite understand how that fit into the play’s story, but it works here), and a group of talking trees. This appears to be a part of a Shona-based series, since there’s an excerpt of another of her adventures in my copy, and per the “By Felony Press (publisher name for the win/selling point)” bit in the front matter. I was mildly entertained, and I admit I did appreciate some of the clever re-envisionings.