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The School Library Journal review on the back of this book claims that, "Fans of the Bard will applaud this highly imaginative, lyrical text that plays with the story without damaging it." The review is a BIG FAT LIE, for I have never seen a retelling damage the original story as much as this one has massacred Hamlet. In an attempt to make the telling "feminist," Lisa made EVERYTHING about Hamlet into an act. The premise of this book is that Ophelia and Hamlet together devised Hamlet's madness -- meaning that when we see Hamlet in scenes which *don't* appear in the play, he's a typical, teen romance, pretty boy, everything else being a clever 'act'. Ophelia then proceeds to fake her own madness, fake her own death, AND manipulate a way for Hamlet to fake his own death. So of course, nearly everyone who was dead at the end of Hamlet was alive at the end of this book. And THEN the author had to make the book into a "crossover" story with Romeo and Juliet, by which point I was just gagging. The only characters that I even recognized from the play were Claudius and Gertrude, whom Lisa left relatively untouched. I think that in order to do a retelling, you really DO need to love the original work, but I would only recommend this retelling to people who hate Hamlet and want to see everything about it cheapened. The fact that Lisa managed to write a whole novel in Elizabethan English does not make up for the fact that it sucked.
I have a feeling this book would be funny anyway, but if you know Los Angeles, it is really hilarious.