Jennifer M. (Kaydence) reviewed on 6/23/2014 + 380 more book reviews

Summary:
As a retelling of Hamlet, the general plot line is known. This is told from Ophelia's point of view. She is the daughter of an administrator at Elsinore Academy who sees ghosts and fae. Because of these visions, she is heavily medicated. The Headmaster dies and his son, Dane, is heavily affected by this death. In order to ease some of that pain, he turns to Ophelia, but the two of them have a very volatile relationship. As Ophelia begins to go crazy, she has to make a decision to keep or break a promise.

My thoughts:
While I love Shakespeare and try read all of the retellings as possibilities to read as juxtapositions within my high school classroom, I don't always enjoy the retelling. This is a very well written novel, with the small exceptions of when Hutchison mimics Shakespeare's poetry. Hutchison has beautiful prose and the poetry doesn't really mix well which immediately takes me out of the story. I found that I didn't really like Ophelia. While she is fully fleshed out and described, I just didn't care for her. It's interesting because I felt like I understood all of the motivation behind her decisions, and I felt drawn with something within the novel. I didn't want to stop reading. I wanted to help her deal with Dane and all of the problems that she was going through. I wanted to throw away the pills and try to help her make sense of things without going crazy. So, I obviously cared about the character, but I didn't approve of her decisions and spent more time wanting to shake or smack her out of the spiral she was going through, which caused the dislike. This obviously means that the book was written very well. It's just not something I'm going to read again.

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