Celtic mythology meets Legally Blonde by way of a military fantasy adventure, with a unique balance of heart, grit, and camp in this lovable debut by Celtic mythology meets Legally Blonde by way of a military fantasy adventure, with a unique balance of heart, grit, and camp in this lovable debut by Cait Jacobs.
I had the privilege of reading a very early draft of this book about two years ago, and it captured my heart. It may combine a fascinating collection of ideas (Legally Blonde but make it a gritty military romantasy with knights, and also make it kind of a retelling of Celtic folklore?) that you wouldn't expect to go together, but Cait has poured so much care into the conversation of all of these elements from the silly musical references to the complex disability representation, and it really pays off in this heartfelt adventurous tale.
If you like diverse casts, fantasy adventures, women with swords (who also wear gorgeous dresses), found family, court politics, gritty action scenes, feet-kicking romance, and Legally Blonde (of course), I think you'll adore this book as much as I did....more
woah... actually in my top 3 favorite shakespeare plays. I WILL be talking of graves, of worms, and epitaphs!! maybe we should sit upon the ground andwoah... actually in my top 3 favorite shakespeare plays. I WILL be talking of graves, of worms, and epitaphs!! maybe we should sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings???...more
It's one thing knowing in theory that Hamlet by William Shakespeare isn't incredibly original and rather is very aligned with the early modern trends It's one thing knowing in theory that Hamlet by William Shakespeare isn't incredibly original and rather is very aligned with the early modern trends of revenge tragedy, and it's another thing to read one of those revenge tragedies and say "wow this is just like Hamlet but if it was less gay, kinder to its female characters, EXTREMELY horny, and if Claudius was an atheist used by the narrative to push anti-atheist agendas."...more
Oct 2024: read Q1 for the first time! I can't believe it took me this long generally, and that it took this being required class reading for me to getOct 2024: read Q1 for the first time! I can't believe it took me this long generally, and that it took this being required class reading for me to get to it. I do take issue with it being labeled as the ‘Bad’ Quarto on here now that I know that calling it a bad quarto is scholarly contentious these days, because it's likely a version adopted for touring production! anyways, a fascinating read as a Hamlet nerd but missed a lot of the gay shit....more
This story really did NOT need to be separated into two parts. This was a whole lot of excess nonsense to flesh out Henry IV's death into a whole playThis story really did NOT need to be separated into two parts. This was a whole lot of excess nonsense to flesh out Henry IV's death into a whole play tbh...more
the perfect book to help me cope with the odd cognitive dissonance of getting a shakespeare degree amidst the political climate of the past week and cthe perfect book to help me cope with the odd cognitive dissonance of getting a shakespeare degree amidst the political climate of the past week and change. reminded me that my passions matter even if they don’t feel important enough sometimes, and that america is always in times of turmoil and struggle but there’s always times ahead. there’s something comforting about building community through history right now....more
What a joyfully queer play. Performed in 1592 in front of the Queen of England, this play follows two young virgins,Yield Ladies, yield to love Ladies
What a joyfully queer play. Performed in 1592 in front of the Queen of England, this play follows two young virgins, who are dressed in drag and sent into the woods by their fathers, who are afraid that they're so beautiful and fair that they'll be sacrificed to Neptune.
In the woods, Cupid plays pranks on Diana and her nymphs, causing them to experience love for the two young "men," for which Diana retaliates by making Cupid her servant. We also stumble upon some men reminiscent of the Midsummer Mechanicals, off on a journey of apprenticeships under an astronomer, alchemist, and fortune teller. Meanwhile, the two young women heavily suspect that the other is also just a woman in drag (and are both VERY bad at hiding it, trying to flirt with each other as women), and pretty immediately have the hots for each other.
At the end of the play, all the characters meet, Venus shows up and demands Cupid back, and Neptune agrees not to sacrifice anymore virgins. The girls in drag are "revealed" to be girls in drag (it was always obvious) and they announce, in front of everyone, that they are in love. Everyone seems to be baffled but also kind of okay with it and Venus says she can change one of them into a boy to allow them to be married, but the girls do not care about gender, so Venus says it'll be a surprise which one! (Then one of their dads says "hey, if we can just... change genders of people, can we make my wife a man?" which is really iconic.) Then they all go offstage and we have an iconic epilogue by our titular character telling all the women of the audience to be lesbians (including the quote mentioned above).
So yeah, great play. Thanks Lyly for the lesbians....more
Shakespeare's histories have always intimidated me, leaving me to put off tackling them. And though I saw tI've really been sleeping on this one, huh?
Shakespeare's histories have always intimidated me, leaving me to put off tackling them. And though I saw this play many years ago, I hadn't remembered much about it. But that must have been a fault of the production because I can't believe that this complex and stunning play could have escaped my mind.
Comprable to Hamlet and Macbeth, Richard III is an incredible tragic historical work about cycles of violence, hubris, revenge and even ableism. Definitely worth tackling the histories for this one....more
An incredible read for anyone interested in Shakespeare and/or queer history. Through fictional vignettes and a glorious web of research, Will Tosh prAn incredible read for anyone interested in Shakespeare and/or queer history. Through fictional vignettes and a glorious web of research, Will Tosh provides a clear picture of Shakespeare's life and world through a queer lens.
This book has sparked so many interests and has introduced me to so many new rabbit holes to dig down, and I can't wait to investigate the inspirations for this book and the many queer contemporaries of Shakespeare....more
Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. -The Tempest 1.2
I once read somewhere that no man is an islaNothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange. -The Tempest 1.2
I once read somewhere that no man is an island. But I think maybe girls are.
It's been a few months since I've read a Shakespeare retelling, hasn't it? Well this week, I was studying The Tempest for class (not for the first time), was craving a horror read, and figured maybe it was time for me to pick up this sapphic Tempest-inspired story with Yellowjackets vibes.
Now, I was expecting more of a direct retelling, which this story wasn't. It's not so much that it's reimagining The Tempest but holding a conversation with it. Certain elements feel superimposed upon each other, but don't follow direct parallels in regards to the narrative or characters.
In this book, we follow Violet Whitlock: a "volatile" child in foster care who struggles with school and relationships, feral and sharp in all the places little girls should be tame and obedient. So Violet borrows the name and academic resume of her golden child twin sister to apply for a summer contest with the Shakespeare Center, with one lucky winner getting to accompany a group of teen celebrities to the filming of a new movie adaptation of (you guessed it, reader,) The Tempest. But when their slimy male director decides to take them on a whaling journey instead of a direct plane flight to the set, the ship finds itself in the middle of a (there's literally no other way I can word this, you must understand) tempest and ends up washing the girls and their director ashore on a remote island off the Pacific Coast. But the island isn't everything it seems and the girls find themselves metamorphosing in their fight for survival.
As a horror novel alone, this book was compelling and exciting and unbelievably nauseating. The body horror alone had me swallowing down bile on the tube. I'm sure many people in public wondered why I looked so green. In contrast to the dizzying gore, this book had incredibly lush and stunning atmosphere and descriptors. The island was haunting and unnerving, sure, but like Caliban's speech about his own island, was enchanting and alluring and abundant in its beauty. It was dream-like, yet viscerally easy to picture. This is a book that calls for a gorgeous adaptation or at least some beautiful fanart. (If I have time amidst grad school life, I'll try, I promise.)
But the best part of this book is its allegorical applications. See, this story is about trauma. It's about the claws and armor that young girls have to build in order to keep themselves safe from prying eyes and roaming hands. And it would've been enough to make the survival efforts of the shipwreck girls a parallel for the perpetual state of survival they embody in the real world. But McCauley takes a step further through the more speculative elements of this story to hold questions about trauma and healing, leaning into the ways that the scars can change people inside and out.
I did leave the book craving just a few more Tempest parallels, especially since the application of Shakespeare onto the text was quite heavy-handed. (Not only was the play constantly quoted, but generally, the girls seemed to be named entirely after Shakespeare characters. Which I thought would perhaps lean into a commentary about the way female characters in Shakespeare are treated, a la Enter The Body, but one of them wasn't even named after a female character, and the traits or experiences of said characters had no relation to McCauley's, so it seemed more of a surface-level choice for a wink and a nudge.) There was also a brief line towards the end that does work to parallel some of the book's plot to The Tempest. I had mixed feelings about this, as in some ways, I think it would have been more advantageous to leave that interpretation up to the reader. Especially since this reading of the play called Sycorax the "villain" and implied that the girls were Prospero, which unsettled me considering a lot of the contemporary discussions involving race and land interpretations of the original text. I forgive McCauley because not everyone is neck-deep in Shakespeare scholarship every day like I am, but I just wish it had been open for those parallels to be assigned by the readership in personally impactful ways, especially with the connections to the play being as loose as they were. BUT. That being said, the relationship of the land to the girls, the conversations about bodily autonomy, and the themes of freedom and survival provided this story with plenty of comparative elements to the original play, all of which I thought were utilized beautifully.
Overall, just a really good YA horror with allegory, atmosphere, sapphics, and Shakespeare.
CW: body horror, blood & gore, violence, drowning, injury detail, adult/minor relationship, grooming, emesis, death, suicide, animal death, character death...more
