Review: A Rose by Any Other Name

A Rose by Any Other Name by Jamie Lackey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is the second book by Jamie Lackey that I recently picked up from Netgalley because the premise sounded intriguing: Romeo and Juliet, only there's magic, and they swap bodies.

Unfortunately, like the other book ( Andromeda Snow, Superhero ), the execution didn't quite deliver on the promise of the blurb. The author seems mostly to write short fiction, and I often find novellas are novels that didn't get enough development; the plots are linear and the characters lack depth. That's the case here as well.

While the characters have the names of Shakespeare's characters, they are not those characters. Romeo and Juliet, for example, are young adults, not teens. Some of the redevelopment makes the characters more interesting - Tybalt is not just an angry thug, but loves cats and starts a relationship with Benvolio, for example; but because this is a PG retelling, the nurse and Mercutio both lose their bawdiness, the latter being transformed from a fan of sexual wordplay to an asexual, and the former becoming a bit of a background character. Part of the PG nature of the story is that the two young people in each other's bodies don't do any exploration of the body of the opposite gender that they suddenly find themselves in.

The retelling also turns the tragedy into comedy (in the sense that lovers are united), and this requires the implacable hatreds of the original to become quite easily placated after a bit of tension.

There are a few anachronisms; Juliet's bedroom contains stuffed animals, and she regrets not having a proper wedding dress or flowers for her wedding, both of which didn't come into common use until the mid-nineteenth century. A very good copy editor is going to need to go over it carefully to find all the missing words in sentences and the several homonym errors before it's published.

Overall, while it was entertaining enough in a light way, there's not much to it, and it doesn't do justice either to the source material or to the premise.

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