They’re just as shallow as Selfor’s Shakespearean characters. The rest of the modern day characters aren’t much better. Mimi facilitates from being a fairly vacuous fill-in heroine to completely annoying and judgmental. The book, despite the title, mostly focuses on Mimi. I understand the obsession with codpieces and tights. The characters speak in modern English slang (‘totally’ is used every other word), but why the do so is never explained satisfactorily. The research is incredibly poor (she keeps mentioning codpieces when they were out of fashion by 1590 – and this story takes place in 1594) and makes me question if she read the play (at one point she states that Tybalt was killed at the end of the play, when he was killed in Act III, Scene I – right smack in the middle of the play). In the play, Benvolio is the peace-maker and voice of reason in this book, he’s a hot-headed creepy womanizing rapist (seriously WTF? DO NOT INSULT MY SHAKESPEARE BF!) Juliet in the play is an incredibly mature and clear-sighted, while this Juliet is immature and foolish. Selfors manages to make rounded Shakespearean characters shallow and flat and many of the characters are inconsistent with their Shakespearean counterparts. I was hoping this book would explore the beauty and depth often ignored and shed new light on the play, but alas that wasn’t to be. I love Romeo and Juliet and I think the play is unfairly maligned. I probably re-read Much Ado About Nothing at least once a year and I always discover something new. I studied Shakespeare in college and even did an independent study on the guy.

There Mimi meets the real Juliet and realizes they both have more in common than she realized. She’s stuck performing in Romeo and Juliet with teen heartthrob Troy Summers until she and Troy are magically transported to Shakespeare’s Verona. Mimi would prefer to be a doctor, but her overbearing mother won’t hear of it. Mimi Wallingford is destined to be an actress…against her will.

Saving Juliet by Suzanne Selfors