2012 book 219

Rebecca Serle's When You Were Mine
Ah, FYA book group, some of the books you make us read are so crappy! I wasn't exactly enthused about reading a modern-day retelling of Romeo and Juliet told from the point of view of Rosalind, the girl Romeo's hung up on before he meets Juliet. And this managed to be even worse than my expectations--the narrator/protagonist is super annoying (I wanted to strangle her sometimes), and the entire plot (I mean, besides the parts we know from Shakespeare) was telegraphed in the first eight percent. Not to mention how silly the updated names were! Caplet and Monteg, seriously? Couldn't Serle have found names that sound like actual names? I picked up the phone book and found two better names (Capelli and Montana, totally catchy!) within ten seconds. And don't even get me started on anything to do with Juliet, who doesn't even show up till like halfway through and whose only character trait is "bitchy," and cardboard cutout bad boy Len, who is kind of a creepy stalker in a certain light. When I was in seventh grade, my class read Romeo and Juliet, and for homework we had to rewrite a scene and set it in some other time period. I am still haunted by how terrible mine was, but some of my classmates' were more realistic than this book. C-.