I would like to thank you for the eARC of this book which was kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
This story is about a girl named Alison Green who is a perfectionist and desperately seek to end the school year as a Valedictorian. In order to make a good impression, Alison agrees to co-produce the school play. However, what she did not know was that instead of co-producing it, she will need to organise everything herself. She asks the help of her sister and best friend and story goes from there. There is a cute romance and a lot of drama involved.
In this story, you can find a representation of pansexuality, lesbian and gay characters. It also explores the internal homophobia. I really liked the cover of the book it is really playful and colourful. I love the theatre and 'Midsummer night's dream is my favourite' play of Shakespeare, so, I had high expectations. This story was short, cute and easy to read. I liked the humour used throughout the story. I have enjoyed seeing how normal it was for two girls walk holding hands or come out to their friends. The normalization of being gay and the acceptance of being who you are was breath of fresh air.
On the not so good note, the story lacked the development of characters and some situations felt flat. Also, some of the situations were introduced (like theatre mafia?) and were left out without any explanation of what happened. The author should have explained in more depth, so readers would not be left hanging and wondering what has happened. Overall a cute romance story.

As much as I appreciate all the coming out stories where the characters are learning to love themselves as their queer selves, this story tries to answer question of what’s next? What does it mean to be out and proud? What does it mean to be out but keeping your business to yourself?

I enjoyed most of the relationships and the support the main character had throughout. The storytelling was funny and genuine. Big hit if you’re big on Shakespeare, but it’s still super enjoyable if you never read it in high school.

I have received this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

The Year Shakespeare Ruined My Life was pretty interesting. In it, you will meet Alison Green. She has hopes and dreams of becoming her class valedictorian. So she honestly will say to any teacher willing to give her recommendation. It just so happens that she said yes to becoming the producer of the school's play.

Now without going into too much detail, this book was cute. I adored some of the friendships and the relationship being formed throughout it. However, I kind of feel like some were forced upon me or they just kind of fizzled out at one point. It honestly didn't matter if certain people were still together at the end or not.. things just weren't adding up for me.

I did, however, really enjoy all the LGBT representation throughout the book. There was even a point in the book where a teacher was completely ignorant and no one really did anything about it. I mean, yes, someone gave some sass.. but no one really put them in their place (in a way?). Not sure how I feel about that even now.

In the end, I am happy that I got a chance to dive into it. This book was cute and the ending was even cuter. I just feel like it was missing something for me in order to fall in love with it.

As a gay woman I felt this book missed the mark - I was unable to empathise with the characters at all and these are supposed to be my people!

But my main issue which pulled my rating down was the use of stereotypes. There were too many stereotypical characters: the alternative girl with an undercut who 'must be at least bi', the gay stylist and the closeted bully. Obviously using these stereotypes is fine, but all together? And with no real attempt to challenge them? It just didn't work for me.

I was really sucked into the book and struggled with the final rating as I couldn't put it down 'till I finished. The ending fizzled for me. I was so engaged and then it suddenly ended, with plot points entirely abandoned without any closure at all.

The premise was fantastic, but the delivery fell a little short for me. Jansen did her best to provide a diverse selection of characters, both through sexual orientation and race/ethnicity, and I think for YA teens this will be a fantastic starting point.

DNF @ 13%

The writing style just doesn't work for me; in particular the dialogue doesn't read as natural (it's grammatically fine but not how people talk). I'm also tired of how the narrator feels the need to show how special the love interest are by talking negatively about everyone else —"she wasn't like the other girls," "watching him act compared to the other auditions was like watching Patrick Stewart after seeing the latest teen heartthrob in a forgettable teen drama."

And the final straw for me was the comment that the LI's undercut indicates she must be "at least bi." Despite a previous cursory protest against gay stereotypes, this isn't challenged; also, it implies that being bi is somehow lesser than being gay.

Thank you so much to net galley for sending me a copy of this book . I was really excited to read this book and I was not disappointed.

I loved this story! It was super fun and as a past theater kid, it added an extra layer of fluff and joy to this read for me. I also loved there being a f/f romance at the forefront and how the book stayed overall rather lighthearted and enjoyable to read.

This was so cute! I sometimes struggled a bit with the writing style but it was a fun read and overall quite enjoyable!

The story was quite interesting in some ways. I loved how Alison gets major character development at the end of the book, and learns that being a perfectionist should not get in the way of your relationships with your loved ones. However, I feel the book missed a major climax. The story would just show Alison screwing up, then fixing issues. Then screwing up, and fixing again. It just went back and forth. But I loved the story of Ben and there being a strong reason for his terrible personality. A good read overall.

I got an arc for this on NetGalley after seeing some people talking about it and I have to say, it was really cute! I wasn't a theatre kid in high school, but I was theatre kid adjacent. (AKA: all my friends were theatre kids.) From the memories I have of play season, this is exactly how I pictured all the 'behind the scenes' of my friends' rehearsals. Only this one was far cuter and gayer than anything in my high school ever was.

Alison was a painfully accurate teenage protagonist, from the perfectionism to wanting to avoid conflict at all costs. I was cringing a lot, but I can't deny I saw my younger self in her the entire time. The entire cast of characters was also very sweet and believable, even overly dramatic Mr. Evans and at times obnoxious Ben. I was rooting for all of the kids by the end and hoping they all got their happy ending. (Which they did!)

I did wish we'd seen more of Alison and Charlotte together, as we get a few of their conversations and are mostly just told about how smitten they are and how much they like each other without much to actually show for it. On one hand, I guess this is a lot like every shallow high school relationship ever, but on the other, I could read through their corgi inspired drama for days!

Starting off, I received an ARC galley for this book, so thanks to Netgalley and Second Story Press for this opportunity!
The premise of this book is that our protagonist, Alison, takes on (and is somewhat tricked into) producing her school's production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in the hopes of boosting her chance at valedictorian. And she's also struggling with a massive crush on one of the actresses, Charlotte. Standard high school rom com dramatics.
I should mention that I was very much like the main character in high school. No, I wasn't up for valedictorian or any of that, but I was asked by my fairly incompetent choir/theater teacher to run things a lot more than I probably should have been. I "co"produced an entire musical theater production with a full cast and fun numbers when I was a sophomore in high school. I felt a little personally attached to the predicament the main character was in on a lot of levels. It's likely my opinions about the book are a little (possibly a lot, you decide that, lovely reader) biased.
With that in mind, I had a lot of hopes for this book. It was one of the first galley's I received from netgalley, so I was really excited to start reviewing this book that I thought would be the literal coolest.
I would recommend this book to a high schooler. Shocker, since you know, it's young adult. But the writing style wasn't my absolute favorite, and the characters felt pretty one dimensional, and being in Alison's head was a lot harder than I anticipated. Her point of view was almost exhausting. This might be because she thought very similarly to the way I did in high school, which I really don't want to relive, so honestly, good on Jansen for writing a teenager's brain chaotic enough that it made me have painful flashbacks to suppressed moments.
There were some aspects in lieu of representation that I really appreciated. Charlotte (possibly a spoiler?) comes out as pansexual, having to explain what that means to our lovely chaotic lesbian protagonist. I did appreciate that, and I generally enjoyed the protagonist coming to terms with herself, because even though she was out to everyone, it sometimes felt like in the beginning she wasn't really out to herself, and the events of the book really help her reach that point.
I didn't love the use of the "lowkey-perverted-bully-is-actually-closeted-gay-with-internalized-homophobia" trope, just because it was used here, as it usually is used, to convince the audience to root for this character, to disregard any bad thing he's said or done in the past. That's a personal pet peeve, and this trope can be done well, but I didn't feel that it was in this instance. There was also an instance where the main character sort of outed the bully character? But also she was asked to? It was a weird instance, but the character felt very pressured to come out and I wasn't entirely comfortable with that plotline.
I think my main issue with the characters was that they felt like caricatures. When character's are shown being perverted or racist or gross, it's not subtle. It's characters, like the theater director, saying he wants to incorporate Bollywood themes and then saying he wants kimonos in the show. He's called out for cultural appropriation (and rightfully so), but I worry that by creating examples of people that are saying absurdly racist/sexist/awful things, you're not hitting at the significance of it. It felt more like a throwaway joke than commentary on high school theater productions.
My main goal is to be a positive reviewer, so hey. This was a book with a fun sense of humor. Given that this is Dani Jansen's debut, I see a lot of really awesome potential here, and I'll be keeping her on my radar. I'm sure that there are people out there who will enjoy this book, even if I didn't, because I feel like it could be a good read for high school theater kids. If you liked that book Ship It by Britta Lundin, you might like this.

The title of this book could also be “Tatiane’s 2019 in a nutshell”

First of all, thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I read Shakespeare for the first time last year, when I had to present a seminar about A midsummer night’s dream and Romeo and Juliet for my English Literature classes and had to play some of their roles. So, when I read about The year Shakespeare ruined my life, I instantly thought “It’s me! It’s exactly what happened to me!” (Not the romance thing, but the “Shakespeare ruined my life” thing, just to make it clear). And it was very nice to feel this kind of sympathetic identification to the main plot and to the main characters of Jansen’s book. In fact, it was a great insight to put the trope “school play about Shakespeare” as main plot since many people will feel sympathetic about it.
The main character, Alison, is producing the school play A midsummer night’s dream to get extra credits and maybe be at the valediction in her graduation. As producer, Alison has to deal with the play and her personal life at the same time, which includes, in one hand, actors, designers, proms and stuffs like that and, on the other hand, potential romance, new and old friendships, family relationships, school and universities issues, and more. For a teenager, it’s a lot to think about in so little time (and lots of responsibilities too), which made me feel very empathetic to her, especially when things get chaotic. She is smart, brilliant, hard worker and gives too much to people and things she is committed to ¬— it’s almost impossible to not like her.
Other characters, like her friends and sister, are good as well. They are funny and supportive, which make me like them instantly. Still, I feel like I don’t know them very well, even now. Alison is the narrator — and, to be honest, I can’t imagine better narrator — but her thoughts about the others are flat. The minor characters are flat — they don’t surprise us, don’t make us love them, don’t make us feel empathy or anything, which made me wonder “what were they thinking? What were they feeling? Who were they indeed?”. The only and truly significant character is Alison and, maybe, her loved one. That is one of the reasons this book, in my opinion, is a 3-stars.
The other reason is that it was very difficult to keep reading this book. Things take too long to go to the point. Nothing happened — at least, nothing interesting enough to make me think “I can’t sleep because I need to finish it!”. It took me weeks to finish this story and when I finished it I felt not disappointed, but not surprised either. The plot about the womanizer guy who is actually gay (that was the plot twist? Really?), by the way, was very stereotyped. Maybe it had worked out five years ago but now it was very unnecessary and could have been better developed.
Thus, it was a god book and I will definitely recommend to my friends. It has failures and it could be better in some aspects but it is a good book and very important to LGBTQ+ YA literature community. I will definitely read the next author’s books.

I really wanted to like this book. It had all of the elements that I love: theatre, diverse representation, and a hard-working protagonist. Sadly, it fell off the mark. The characters were really flat, feeling more like stereotyped high school molds than real people. I also felt like the main character was especially underdeveloped. She's a perfectionist who wants to be valedictorian, and that's the most we ever really learn about her. She has no personality outside of her ambitious goals, leaving all interactions with other characters feeling awkward and forced. I especially hated whenever the POV would suddenly go into 2nd person. I also didn't understand the premise of this book. This book made it sound like the protagonist needed a teacher recommendation for Valedictorian, which was confusing to me, because, at least in my high school, the valedictorian is based solely on GPA and nothing else. I did like how the book discussed different issues for LGBT teens including being "out enough" and the feeling of support from family members.

Alison aims high always, she wanted to be the best, she wanted to give her best. Everyone around her acted like high school was easy even her girlfriend thought she was over reacting but maybe it was easy for them but definitely not for her. But one thing that she was fortunate to have was a loving family who supported her when she told them she was gay and a best friend who always was there for her. Now, she is presented with an opportunity to produce the school play, the play her sister called ‘Ye Olde Shakespearean Disaster’. But she can’t let that happen. With the help of a Red Binder and her friends and the cast she tries to give her best yet again.
I liked the story very much for its about Shakespeare and how he ruined Alison’s life which basically is me. I still can’t recite one line from his work. It’s always hard for me to get the Shakespeare kind of English. Also its Pride Month and this book qualifies for that also🌈. Her struggle to get things done are so real. I wasn’t quite satisfied with the threat call Alison got cause nothing of it was said after that. As if it never happened. But on the whole it was a simple, light read and a funny high school play.

I did not finish the book. I only got to around 20 percent, and that was because I wanted to give as fair as possible a review. The writing here is just so flat. It’s boring. I wasn’t interested in anything going on, because the writing style completely lacked engagement. Also, the title led me to believe there would be a lot more Shakespeare than there was. As an English teacher, I was looking for a comedic ya book that could play well with my course content, but be enjoyable and engaging. I wanted to be able to suggest this book to my students. Not happening.

I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review!

Alison is your awkward, average-looking nerd who wants more than anything to become valedictorian. In order to help her chances, she agrees to produce her school play and that's when her life starts getting more complicated. For starters, she has to deal with her best friend Becca, who is in love with her oldest friend Jack, but won't ever consider speaking to him and her crush Charlotte, who is way too cool for her. On top of that, she still has to study hard to achieve her dreams. This sounds like a recipe for disaster, but maybe things have to get really messy before they get really good.

This book was so cute!! The characters were well-rounded and relatable and screaming at Alison to stop creating messes bigger than herself was so fun. It was a light read with a happy ending and that was definitely what I needed.

One thing I disliked was the conflict between Alison and Charlotte, it wasn't built up appropriately, so I felt like it was coming out of the blue. Nevertheless, I loved their romance and I was cheering them on the whole time!

I really enjoyed this book and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a cute lesbian romance!

Thank you so much to NetGalley and publisher for this ARC

The Year Shakespeare Ruined my Life is about a girl named Alison who wants to end her high school years as a valedictorian, because of that she accepts to produce her school's production ‘A Midsummer Night's Dream’, but that's not her only problem, she accepts to go on a date with her bestfriend Jack although she has a little crush on Charlotte.
Keeping good grades to become her high school’s valedictorian, (co) produce a play, plus her love life: a complete disaster.
I liked this book, it was easy to read, cute and funny. I liked Alison so much, she is a perfectionist and a positive person, you can feel how much effort she puts on everything she does and how important it is for her, and I loved so much how she learns to calm down a little bit and talks with all the people she loves. Another point of this book that I liked too, was her relationship with her sister, bestfriend and family; I liked the interaction between them, how much they love each other and that they are her inner circle who will always help her.
I liked that the author talked about being who you are, and even Alison mentioned how being who you are is your own business. She seemed very sure about it, but at some points it actually became a problem for her and I ended a little bit confused about Alison’s mixed feelings.

The romantic history was a little flat for me, I didn't feel a connection between Alison and her crush. Another point I didn’t like was that some characters were there to interact with Alison but then they disappear, they were there to cause problems or help her to solve them and then we don’t see them anymore.

I think this book is perfect for teens because they would see themselves through the characters, their problems and also the good times. It was so good to read something so refreshing, it was really sweet and cute.

Alison Green can't seem to stop putting her foot in her mouth. This book was fun, and made me laugh at times. The quirkiness of the different characters allowed them to be well rounded. And the teens acted like teens, which I think a lot of YA books miss.

I do have some grievances, though. Alison Green does not seem to really learn from her mistakes. The romance with Charlotte was sweet, and made Alison a bit more likeable. The drama with Zack, and his in the closet boyfriend, was also a fun part of this book. I just wish the main character had more character development in all of this.

All in all though, this book made me laugh. I enjoyed the weird dramas that happened to Alison and her friends. It was a funny read.

Thanks to the publisher and author for giving me a free copy in exchange for an honest review! There might be mild spoilers in this review!

This was so cute! I flew through this book (it reads so fast!!! :)) and I really enjoyed it. I LOVED the Shakespeare aspect. I've read quite some books with something along the lines of a Shakespeare play or something in it and it's making me really curious about his works (I've never read them, not one, pls don't judge me). I'll be sure to check them out sometime! The story itself was a bit predictable, but I didn't mind.

I saw myself in Alison, I felt really connected to her. She's always saying yes and so am I. It's quite frustrating at some times, because you don't want to let people down. As a result you say yes to everything and before you know it you have too much on your plate. Also, overthinking. I do that a lot too. ALSO, can we talk about her attitude towards her being gay? She's like: I'm out, but I don't shove it down everyone's throats. I liked that, but it did cause some irritation, because, helloooooo Jack doesn't know you're gay so he's thinking he stands a chance. But tbh, it was funny to read about that.

I loved this book, the representation is quite good and I recommend reading it if you ever get a chance to!

DNF at 15%. Flat characters and dull writing which read more at middle grade level than YA. High school Shakespeare productions were a beloved part of my childhood, so I was hoping to love this book, but it didn't hold my interest.