Was the greatest ever love story a lie?
The first time Romeo Montague sees young Rosaline Capulet he falls instantly in love. Rosaline, headstrong and independent, is unsure of Romeo’s attentions but with her father determined that she join a convent, this handsome and charming stranger offers her the chance of a different life.
Soon though, Rosaline begins to doubt all that Romeo has told her. She breaks off the match, only for Romeo’s gaze to turn towards her cousin, thirteen-year-old Juliet. Gradually Rosaline realizes that it is not only Juliet’s reputation at stake, but her life .With only hours remaining before she will be banished behind the nunnery walls, will Rosaline save Juliet from her Romeo? Or can this story only ever end one way?
Shattering everything we thought we knew about Romeo and Juliet, Fair Rosaline is the spellbinding prequel to Shakespeare’s best known tale, which exposes Romeo as a predator with a long history of pursuing much younger girls. Bold, lyrical, and chillingly relevant, Fair Rosaline reveals the dark subtext of the timeless story of star-crossed lovers: it’s a feminist revision that will enthrall readers of bestselling literary retellings such as Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell and Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese
- Title: Fair Rosaline
- Author: Natasha Solomons
- Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
- Publication Date: September 12, 2023
- Genre: Historical fiction, retelling
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: toxic relationship, adult/minor relationship, gaslighting, death of a parent, death, emotional abuse, drugging, infidelity, murder, miscarriage, still birth, graphic depictions of death on page, blood and gore, sexual abuse, grooming
- Rating: ★.5
Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons is a retelling/reimagining of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but from Rosaline’s perspective. Who is Rosaline you ask? Rosaline Capulet is the elusive beauty that Romeo is supposedly in love with before he meets Juliet. Not much is known about her, aside from the fact that she is a Capulet, and Romeo’s infatuation with her is what leads him to sneak into the Capulet ball, where he meets Juliet. That is, that’s all we know about her from Shakespeare’s version. With this novel, Natasha Solomons gives voice to the other Capulet girl that is neither seen, nor heard in Romeo and Juliet, but is a catalyst for the events of the story.
Since I will check out anything that is even remotely related to Shakespeare and/or Romeo and Juliet, I had this book pretty high on my radar, and while there were some aspects that I enjoyed, unfortunately, this book as a whole didn’t work for me.
Let’s start with something positive. I love the concept — I love the idea of a retelling/reimagining from Rosaline’s perspective, and I think that the dark and sinister angle Solomons put on the story is incredibly interesting and truly heartbreaking. Reading the way that these young women and girls were manipulated and gaslit had my stomach turning, and each new reveal added to the anguish that Rosaline experiences. I do believe that Solomons succeeds in telling a story of one girl’s resistance to the predatory men of her society and taking control of her life in the only way that she can. What Solomons set out to do she achieved, but to me, she missed the mark on a lot of things.
For the most part, I thought that Rosaline was a well developed character. We meet her just after her mother has died from the plague, and we get to see how that grief and loss affects her, and how it lowers her guard when it comes to Romeo’s advances. She was very determined and strong willed and clearly would do anything for those that she loves, all of which are qualities that I admire in a person. However, I was disappointed to read the author’s note and discover that Solomons admits to creating her version of Rosaline based on the Rosaline/Rosalind’s from Shakespeare’s other plays As You Like It and Love’s Labour’s Lost. With an essentially blank canvas to create this Rosaline, it seems a bit lazy to intentionally pull characteristics from other Shakespeare characters and not develop her otherwise.
While I liked the close relationship between Rosaline and Juliet at the start of the book, I particularly hated the characterization of Juliet as the story continues on. Now, I get that Solomons is telling a different story than what we know from Shakespeare, but the best thing about Juliet as a character is how much gravitas she has. She, like this version of Rosaline, is determined and strong willed. She knows what she wants and does everything within her very limited power to fight for what she wants. Solomons completely erased all of that and she paints Juliet as a much younger character, not in age (she’s still thirteen turning fourteen in Fair Rosaline) but in tone. Juliet reads far younger than thirteen, and while I understand that she wanted to portray Juliet’s innocence and play up the predatory nature of her Romeo, I believe that the author could’ve done so without infantilizing Juliet. In fact, in the 2019 musical & Juliet, they do portray Romeo as a player who has had many prior relationships, but never once did they infantilize their Juliet while telling that story. If David West Read (book writer of & Juliet) could get that across without removing the core of Juliet’s character, Solomons could’ve done the same.
Solomons wrote a lovely friendship and bond between Rosaline and Tybalt and then had to completely ruin it with Tybalt confessing his romantic feelings for Rosaline. I know it was a different time and inter-familial relationships were common and supported to “keep the bloodlines close/pure” (yuck), this completely came out of left field and ruined a lovely bond between the two Capulet outcasts. Rosaline was also incredibly wishy-washy throughout the entire storyline and it drove me insane. It didn’t add anything to the development of either Tybalt or Rosaline, it didn’t move the plot forward and was utterly unnecessary.
The biggest issue I had was probably the general length and pacing. Fair Rosaline isn’t a long book; in fact, the ebook is 328 pages, and that’s including all the features at the end of the book such as authors note, reading group guide, a conversation with the author, etc. However, when I tell you that this book feels long, I truly mean that this book feels long. I thought these chapters were around 50ish pages each, but it turns out that the longest chapter is only 38 pages — this audiobook is 12 hours long, where is all of this length coming from? It’s truly confusing to me, and furthermore, the pacing feels off. The book quickly got repetitive and after about three chapters, I found myself getting frustrated — yes, we get it, Rosaline does not want to be sent to the convent, which I understand and don’t blame her for, but she says it multiple times in every single chapter. I got the message the first time, it does not need to be repeated upwards of five times a chapter, maybe more and that continues from page one to page 328. The same thing happened toward the latter half of the book in conversations between Juliet and Rosaline; while I understand the purpose of these conversations, they really were just going around and around in circles. In my opinion, there should have been fewer of those scenes, at maximum three, since it was the same result with different tactics each time, and truthfully, it just got boring after the third time.
I didn’t dislike Solomons’ writing style per se, but it definitely felt inconsistent. I found myself getting especially frustrated with the misuse of some Shakespearean language. There’s a moment when Rosaline is waiting for Romeo to come to her and she thinks “wherefore was he?” — wherefore doesn’t mean where as in the location of something or someone, wherefore means the reason behind something. By using wherefore in this instance, what the author is actually saying is “why was he” which sort of works within the context if she means “why was he not sending word”, but that’s not how this moment reads. I happened to be listening to the audiobook while following along in the ebook, and at that moment the audiobook literally says “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” which means “Why are you Romeo? Why are you a Montague?” which is not what the author was intending at this moment, meaning, wherefore was not the correct word to use. This is fairly common knowledge if you read a lot of Shakespeare (which based on the author’s note, it seems that Solomons does/has), and I’m unsure of how this got past editors, especially since wherefore was used twice more and in the correct context. I think the editors needed to spend more time looking at the book, especially since many of the issues I noticed could’ve easily been fixed. This felt especially frustrating since I do think there were moments of really lovely language and prose, but oftentimes I found myself fact checking certain things instead of losing myself in the story.
Additionally, some of the writing just felt lazy. I was annoyed that the author had Rosaline and Romeo meet by Rosaline disguising herself as a man and sneaking into a Montague masquerade ball. This doesn’t even work as a way to show the “moves” Romeo uses when trying to seduce a girl because Rosaline is the one who sneaks in — the two literally could’ve met any other way and it was frustrating that they author simply chose to recycle the meeting of Romeo and Juliet, and then have Rosaline say that him sneaking into the Capulet ball was predatory. I’m not saying that this version of Romeo wasn’t being predatory when he did that, but it very much so felt hypocritical since Rosaline did the same thing. However, I did enjoy the references to other Shakespeare stories and characters throughout the book, that was a nice treat!
As I mentioned earlier, I do think that Solomons achieved what she set out to do with Fair Rosaline and I applaud her for that. I can also see why this book resonates with people, unfortunately, I was not one of them.
Links for Fair Rosaline: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop
