by Celia Rees
ages: 14+
First sentence: “Have you seen a city under sack?”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy sent to me by the publisher.

Ever wonder what happens after the end of Twelfth Night? You know, how everyone is happily married, how the “bad” guy conveniently disappears? What happens next? Is it really happily ever after?

Well, not exactly. Celia Rees takes the ending of Twelfth Night — the play conveniently summed up for those of us who are unfamiliar with it — and spins it out. It’s no longer a comedy; even though Feste is still around, he’s not the comic relief. In fact, there isn’t any comic relief. Violetta, Viola’s daughter, is in exile from Ilyria after her mother’s disappearance and the country is overrun, and her father killed, because of the coup her uncle Sebastian and Malvolio directed. She makes her way to London, where she runs into
a certain playwright, Will Shakespeare, and enlists his help in finding Malvolio and restoring her to her country.

It’s an interesting idea; I’ve wondered about Shakespeare’s comedies in the past, especially since so many of them are only comedies by the slimmest margin. A turn of the hand, and everything falls into tragedy. And yet, this book didn’t grab me. I picked it up and put it down a few times, trying to get into the story. Once I pushed past chapter three, the story picked up a bit. Shakespeare came into play — Rees’s take on Shakespeare was intriguing; he was a gentleman and a hard-working genius, not a scoundrel or a fraud as I have seen him portrayed elsewhere — and the pace picked up a bit.

Except that scoundrels and frauds are more interesting. That’s the biggest problem with this book: everyone’s bland. Shakespeare’s only mildly interesting, Feste’s annoying. Violetta’s bland, there’s no chemistry between her and the love of her life, Stephano. In fact, with about 70 pages to go, I decided I Just. Didn’t. Care. and abandoned it. (Yeah, I read the ending first, so I’m counting it as a finish.) I like what-ifs, and I like adventure, and I like mystery. But it all has to be pretty spectacular in order to get me past characters who don’t grab my attention.

And this one just didn’t.