ARC Review: Enter the Body by Joy McCullough

In the room beneath a stage’s trapdoor, all of Shakespeare’s tragically dead teenage girls–Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and others–compare their experiences and retell the stories of their lives in their own terms.

Enter the Body gives voice to a cast of the young women who die in Shakespeare’s most iconic plays. Focusing on the stories of Juliet, Ophelia, and Cordelia, bestselling author of Blood Water Paint Joy McCullough brilliantly weaves retellings of Romeo & Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear into a larger story about how young women can support each other in the aftermath of trauma.

• Title: Enter the Body
• Author:  Joy McCullough
• Publisher: Dutton Books
• Publication Date: March 14, 2023
• Genre: Retelling 
• Source: ARC provided by Publisher/Author in exchange for an honest review
• Targeted Age Range: Young Adult
• Content Warnings: While none of the following events happen on the page in this telling, the following things are referenced as having happened in other versions of these stories: sexual assault, mutilation, death by many forms: suicide, murder, hanging, burning, drowning, intimate partner violence (taken from the content warnings at the beginning of the book)
• Rating: ★★★★★

As it has been established on the blog time and time again, I love Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s works have burrowed themselves so deeply into my soul and the person I’ve become that it’s almost hard to untangle myself from these stories. I spend much of my time reading and analyzing Shakespeare’s text and watching countless adaptations of these stories that I so desperately love. Because of this, I often seek out any sort of media that is inspired by Shakespeare. 

When I first heard about Joy McCullough’s Enter the Body (through her twitter account, I believe) and saw that it was a retelling of Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Hamlet that focuses on the young women in these stories and gives them the voices they’ve been denied of for four hundred years, I knew that I had to read it.

As McCullough says in her authors note, Shakespeare “had an extraordinary gift for taking familiar stories and transforming them into works of art that would resonate with not only the audiences of his day, but for decades and centuries to come. And obviously an astonishing gift for language.” All of this is true, but I think we all know that there are many of his characters that get the short end of the stick, namely, the young girls and women in his stories. Whether this is through total and complete fault of his own, or just a result of the time these stories were written in, the women (usually) do not have the endings that they deserve. McCullough attempts to right some of these wrongs through Enter the Body, and I firmly believe that she has done so. From the moment I started this book, I could not put it down. It captivated me from the very first page, and these young women commanded and demanded my attention until they were through telling their stories. .

Our central location for this story is known as Trap Room — this trap room is “beneath all the stages, anywhere. The ghost light is perpetually on, but it illuminates very little. Which makes it easier to keep to oneself”. The women are transported to this trap room after their onstage deaths, and there they stay until it is time for them to once again go out and play their roles. Juliet, the youngest of them all, crashes through and this time it’s different. This time, she wants to tell her story, and she’s going to make them listen. 

This story is split up into three parts, Part one takes place entirely through sonnets/verses retelling the stories of Juliet, Ophelia, and Cordelia as Shakespeare has written them, but from their perspectives,  with short intervals on how the others in the trap room are observing them. Part two acts as an intermission of sorts, where we are no longer in the stories of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and King Lear — instead, we’re in the trap room with the girls and we get to hear them. Their words, their voices, who they truly are, instead of the characters we know them as. We get to see them interact with each other, and react to the stories that we’re hearing. In part three, we get to hear them reclaim their stories and their endings for themselves.

There is such brilliance in calling this liminal space the girls are in the “Trap Room.” Of course it makes sense as most theater’s have a trap room underneath the stage, but it’s also brilliant for another reason. These young girls and women, throughout their lives were all trapped in some way. Some were trapped by their families, some were trapped by their age or their gender, others were trapped by the men in their lives. All of these women are being brought together, into this space that they cannot leave until they’re summoned to the stage once again, to play a part in someone else’s story. I love the idea that it is in the trap room that they reclaim their stories.

I love that McCullough wanted to take a deeper look at these characters and stories, and also call out some of the problematic and upsetting situations that take place in the source material. In her author’s note she says, “I believe we can love things and also examine where they fall short” and I could not agree with her more. In fact, through loving something you are automatically dissecting the work, and there is always something that could be changed, adjusted, or improved upon. Enter the Body upholds Shakespeare’s works while also asking its audience to look deeper at these stories, these characters, these women and look to who they are beyond what we’ve been led to believe. 

This book arrived at the perfect time, as this year I’m planning on annotating all of Shakespeare’s works, and I know that this story is going to really influence the way that I look at and analyze not only Ophelia and Cordelia (I already annotated Romeo and Juliet in 2022), but all of Shakespeare’s female characters. I have so many thoughts about this book as it really resonated with me, and I feel like I would be doing the book a disservice if I tried to condense all my thoughts into this one post, so keep your eyes peeled for an Annotate with Me post where I’ll really dissect the storytelling and share my thoughts. Until then though, I will leave you with this. If you’re a fan of Shakespeare, I cannot recommend this book more highly.

(Please note that as I am reviewing this book as an ARC, any quotes here may be changed or updated in it’s final printing)

Links for Enter the Body: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop | IndieBound