AUTHOR: Melinda Taub
PUBLISHED: July 2013
CATEGORY: YA
GENRE: Classic Book Sequel/Continuation/inspired, Romance, Historical Fiction
PREMISE: After Romeo and Juliet's death, the Montagues and Capulets continue their fighting and it has gotten out of control. The Prince decides that to stop it, Benvolio and Rosaline must get married to join the two houses. Too bad they hate each other.
MY REVIEW: I'm going to go ahead and say it: Romeo and Juliet is actually probably my least favorite Shakespeare play. Yes, I know, how dare I. I just never could get into it. But then star-crossed love stories have honestly never interested me much so I can't really fault Shakespeare. It's mostly just a personal preference thing. For the record, my favorite Shakespeare play is probably between Midsummer Night's Dream or Two Men From Verona.
So I honestly wasn't expecting to get into this that much. But...I actually liked it quite a bit. First of all Taub plays with history as well as the canon of Romeo and Juliet beautifully. This is a woman who did her damn research and used it to her advantage. It's also written beautifully, a mixture of Shakespearean language but written in such a way that we don't need all those footnotes to tell us what's going on.
The result is a well done continuation of a well known play. It doesn't trod all over the original material for its own purposes like a lot of these things can do. It's well written and actually made me sort of interested in Romeo and Juliet again. So I say, well done, author. Especially considering the fact that this is a debut. This author is one to keep an eye on in the future.
WHO SHOULD READ: Shakespeare fans, Romeo and Juliet fans, historical romance fans
MY RATING: Four out of Five swords
Special Note: If any of you are wondering what's going on with the random reviews. What's going on is my work schedule is kind of kicking me in the butt right now. After much consideration, I've decided from now on to do scheduled reviews because that's the only way to keep up on them nowadays. So I swear you will be see more frequent updates now that I've figured out how to do the scheduled reviews.
This sounds AWESOME!! Although I'm with you on Romeo and Juliet - the only play I disliked more was Hamlet. I loathe Hamlet!! And A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest are porbably my two favourites, so it seems we definitely have similar taste.
ReplyDeleteI JUST started doing scheduled reviews. Sort of. It's hard to have enough written up that you're ahead of yourself...so tiring...egghhh. I wish you luck! It's useful when you get there!