Carol Anne Douglas (https://www.carolannedouglas.com) published the novel “The Mercutio Problem” in 2019. This is her fourth novel and the second in her ‘Merlin’s Shakespeare’ series.

I categorize this novel as ‘PG’ because it contains Violence and Adult Situations. The story is set in contemporary times and in the realms of Shakespeare’s plays.

The primary character is high school actor Beth Owens. The wizard Merlin again sends her back to the age of Shakespeare. She must struggle with Richard III. He has become a mixture of the character from Shakespeare’s play and Merlin’s arch-enemy Mordred.

Richard is fomenting a revolt of Shakespeare’s characters to get their stories rewritten. He not only is causing problems in the world of Shakespeare but also in the real world. There are some characters who want to keep the stories just as Shakespeare wrote them. They have become Owen’s allies.
The young High School student Owens must lead the opposition.

I found the 6.5+ hours I spent reading this 296-page young adult fantasy were interesting. I read the first novel of this series (Merlin’s Shakespeare) and hoped this one would get better. I’m disappointed to say that it didn’t. The basic plot was good, but it felt weak as implemented. There is a bit of LGBTQIA woven into the plot. The selected cover art is OK. I give this novel a 3 out of 5.

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DNF at 25%

I just couldn't get into it as much as I wanted to. This is book 2 to a series, that picks up right where it left off, so trying to read it as a stand alone in this case didn't work too well. I was lost to what was going on and the already built character relationships.

I can't rate this book fairly -

I picked up The Mercutio Problem unaware that it was a sequel to Merlin’s Shakespeare. One of the challenges of writing a stand-alone book within a series, or linked to other series, is the balance between giving the new reader all the necessary background, developing the characters well enough, and yet not boring readers who are already familiar with the cast and setting. Sometimes I can’t tell if a book is a sequel or a stand-alone with a rich and brilliantly handled back story. In this case, it became obvious almost immediately, although to her credit, the author gave me all the information I needed to understand and enjoy the present story.

So the back story from the first book is that Merlin (from the legends of King Arthur) enlists the help of Beth Owens, high school theater student, to convince William Shakespeare to write a play about King Arthur. In the course of this adventure, she meets many characters from Shakespeare’s plays, including flirtatious, charismatic Mercutio (from Romeo and Juliet) and the ultimate villain, Richard III.

At the beginning of the present book, Mercutio is dead, slain not by Tybalt but by Richard. Here comes Merlin again, only this time the problem is that Richard wants to change the ending of Shakespeare’s plays (especially his own) and is going about enlisting various other characters and the ghost of Christopher Marlowe in order to pressure Shakespeare. Not only that, but Merlin offers an added inducement to Beth, that she will take the form of Mercutio within Shakespeare’s plays and if she dies in that form, he will live again. Got all that?

Then comes the fun part, visiting the plays and interacting with the characters, many of whom wander into other plays, too. The dialog is often brilliant, reflecting not only Shakespearean language but the particularities of the specific character (for example, Julius Caesar always talks about himself in the third person and rambles on about honor and fate). Bottom has gone missing, so Midsummerland is perpetually rainy (and Bottomless). Lady MacBeth, who knows a thing or two about tyranny and regret, plays a pivotal role in organizing the resistance against Richard, and King Lear, consumed with guilt, goes rampaging through the other plays to slay anyone who wants to keep the plays as they were originally written.

For me, though, the most interesting parts of the book were the subtle examinations of gender and sexual orientation. Beth encounters the world of the plays primarily in Mercutio’s male (heterosexual) body – although for some reason her genitalia remain female. This anatomical omission strikes her with a sense of relief, which that bothered me. I couldn’t quite put my finger on it until I had a chat with a trans man friend, who spoke about longing about the flat chest he’d had as a child. It seems to me a cheat to give Beth an emasculated, sexless version of Mercutio, instead of the experience of being truly male. Being in Mercutio’s body and behaving as Mercutio offers so many openings for challenging Beth’s notions of gender and orientation, it seems a shame to chicken out of the hard parts (excuse the pun).

A number of times Beth finds herself puzzled but not put off by her/Mercutio’s attraction to women, and wonders what this means for her own, hitherto straight, sexuality. She wrestles with jealousy when her best friend, Sita, comes out as lesbian and gets a girlfriend. Unfortunately, these issues were only suggested and not fully played out. Beth becomes temporarily disenchanted with Mercurio’s flirting but she never comes to a resolution about her own orientation. It would have been marvelous to see her explore non-cis-gendered sexuality, to see her insights and empathy play out in her relationships, and to have her accept being different in more ways than being able to travel to the world of Shakespeare’s plays. While The Mercutio Problem is labeled Young Adult, I don’t think these issues are beyond teens; in fact, I see today’s sophisticated teens as hungry for honest, deep explorations of gender and sexuality.

The book’s prose itself was uneven, from awkward sentence structure and jolting shifts of place and thought progression to nicely described settings from the plays, characterizations, and occasionally brilliantly insightful lines. My favorite was spoken by Ms. Portia Desdemona Capulet, the drama teacher: “But remember that loving great people from the past must always be a one-way love.”

All in all, though, this book was an enjoyable read and a delight to anyone familiar with the many worlds of Shakespeare’s plays. I look forward to reading more of Beth’s adventures, especially her journey of gender and sexual self-discovery.

The usual disclaimer: I received a review copy of this book, but no one bribed me to say anything in particular, one way or the other, about it.

3.5 Stars

*I'd like to preface this review with noting I got it on Net Galley and that I haven't read the first one*

TW: In the book but not in my review a character tries to commit suicide

This book was not what I expected it to be (I picked it up because I love stuff about Shakespeare and frequently use his works in my own writing. The first twenty or so pages of this book were a bit rough because they were very much telling versus showing-- everyone was saying their exact motivations and how they feel and it felt a bit off and wasn't very interesting to read.

After this first bit the book got much more interesting. As a whole I think the ideas in the book are marvelous but the book is very literal when it comes to who the characters are and what they do.

The idea behind the world -- that characters exist separate from our world and have to live with their actions in their respective texts-- is so interesting and really extrapolates the characters. While Othello realises his mistake in regards to killing Desdemona, Hamlet sees how his life and death played out as justice. As someone who has read most of Shakespeare's works and seen and been in a handful, these character interactions were fascinating and I think for the most part faithful to who the characters were in their own stories. "The Mercutio Problem" really addresses how, while Shakespeare's works are brilliant, they are also rampantly sexist and racist. The protagonist, Beth, meets frequently with Lady MacBeth and Titania and shows that they are more than the framework and time frame they were written in.

The writing in the initial part of the book had me fairly certain I would not like it (in fact I had to force myself to read it some weeks after starting). I was reading along as Beth and her friends were saying who they wanted to be in "As You Like It," when Frank (who is noted to be black and overweight) declares he wants to be Malvolio. Everyone else is visibly uncomfortable about having someone black being put in the subservient position of Malvolio. Frank tells everyone "I don't like the way Malvolio is treated in the play, and having me play the part will heighten the audience's discomfort-- as well as yours. That's a good thing. People should be uncomfortable about Malvolio. That's what makes this play more than a story of love and mistaken identities" (p.24). This moment was utterly brilliant and such a wonderful way to address race both in our world but also within the Shakespearean canon. There were a few other moments like this later in the story that made me so much more engaged in the story and less hyper-aware of some of the writing choices.

While I do have some issues with the writing of this being a bit on the nose, and that some of the characters' motivations and interactions could have been more nuanced, I was nonetheless really impressed;I certainly would not have had any issues with the writing had I been reading it as a young teen. It addresses racism, sexism, and homophobia without feeling like pandering or like it was making it worse.

A very intriguing read!

DNF at 20%. Perhaps it’s because this is the second book in the series, but I found it difficult to understand and to get into. While the premise of an actor being pulled into Shakespearean plays is extremely appealing, the execution failed to hold my attention. I’m going to put the first book on my reading list, and once I read it I may return and see if The Mercutio Problem works better for me.