In this well crafted volume, Geraldine McCaughrean takes ten of Shakespeare's best loved plays and recrafts them into exciting stories for for teenagers and young adults, recapturing the narratives, events and characters of each Shakespeare story.
As we explore tales of greed, love, lust, vengeance, betrayal, tragedy and confusion, we meet kings, generals, knights, witches, ghosts, fairies and monsters.
The author adds her own analysis of events with some interesting observations.
She observes how Friar Laurence would have done far better to have spoken up to Juliet's parents that Juliet could not marry Paris, as she was already married to Romeo, Hamlet's dilemma of choosing between an unpleasant life and the fear of a more horrible afterlife if he chooses suicide, she informs reader that Illyria where Twelfth Night is set, is modern day Albania, that the baby that the fairy king, Oberon steals from the fairy queen, Titania is an Indian changeling, and observes after the closing of King Lear how "those were dark days still with no dazzling new dawn to light the way ahead. what does man find out about himself, after all, when suffering strips him bare, What is he, a candle burning on a rainy night? waiting for the storm to blow out."
A great introduction to the world of Shakespeare for young readers.
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