Oh, what a deliciously dark twist on the original play. In this version, the villains from Romeo & Juliet are our heroes and vice versa. The author cleverly uses many of the same lines from Shakespeare's play but are spoken by different characters, giving them new meanings. The plot builds slowly just as Shakespeare's plays do, with the action exploding in Act III. This brilliantly follows the main points of the original yet gives us a new vision through the eyes of Rosaline.

Is this a feminist retelling? Of course, but I think Shakespeare would approve. After all, he was unique in writing female characters that were smart & strong-willed, refusing to live their lives completely controlled by the patriarchy of their time. There are glimpses of the Me Too movement here and it's a natural fit in this context. Even reading about the plague as it is used in the plot now feels much like our struggles as a society with COVID. Shakespeare wrote for the common man and this book only confirms his brilliance to me.

I taught Romeo & Juliet as well as other Shakespearean plays for decades and I loved this fractured version in which our heroines decide to save themselves, as Romeo is hoisted by his own petard. It's glorious and sends the right message to young women. I'll be buying copies for my daughters, granddaughter, and a few former students as soon as it's published!

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this ARC. The review is my own.

Thank you, SOURCEBOOKS Landmark, Sourcebooks Landmark, and NetGalley!

I liked Rosaline as a student reading R&J for class, and was always hurt how she was spoken of. She was going off to be a nun, she was the Capulet Romeo first professed to love, and was so quickly forgotten when he met Juliet. He'd just been sulking Rosaline was going off to a nunnery and spurning him, whereas to me, it seemed as if she was just. . . chilling and not that into him.
He then imprints onto her child cousin, and that always made me uncomfortable. Of course her love for him was true, but how was Romeo's, when he kills her cousin, when they've just met? I did not necessarily cast him as the villain, as I knew that to be the families in the feud, who did not realize and did not look to their tormented children.

Instead here, Romeo is attracted to young girls and his power over them, moving from one to another. He's a sexual predator, supported by his Friar friend, and he hurts girls he passes off to others. I also appreciate too (and I am certain this was purposeful, as Natasha Solomons is Jewish) how very Xtian it was, with the antisemitism of "elites" running underage rings conspiracy. A church was used, a New Testament, a friar, and fair looks of the men involved were repeatedly emphasized.

Beautiful here, was the relationship of Rosaline and Catalina, as well as Rosaline and Juliet. The girls are young teens, Juliet hiding her toys and trying to seem adult, Rosaline dealing with the grief of losing her mother and leaning on another mother figure.

What an interesting take on the classic tale of Romeo and Juliet. In this one however, Rosaline came first, and you follow the story of Rosaline navigating medieval life in Italy. Romeo may not be as romantic as he was once thought to be in this retelling. I think the writing was pretty solid, but I feel the story dragged a bit. I was interested in some parts, but others I felt more like skimming through. I think there is an audience that would love this one!

Everyone knows the story of Romeo and Juliet. Even if you've never read it, you still know the characters, but you may or may not remember Rosaline. She's Romeo's true love before he meets Juliet and this story turns everything you know about the original on its head.

This is such a unique concept, as we watch Rosaline deal with the realities of her life and watch her struggle to try to claim some independence and protect her cousin from her ex. I think this has such good writing and a truly good story. It's dark at times and deals with serious issues of medieval Italy - this is not like the latest Hulu movie about Roseline (although there are similar vibes at times)

love this take on a classic. Why not take a new look at an old favourite in a new perspective. great use of building up side characters.

3 out of 5 stars.

A great premise but just not executed to its fullest potential. It was quite slow and I found the plot to be a bit weak despite it being an iconic play.

(To be honest, I adore this play and I don't even hate Romeo. I always thought it was iconic that 2 teens with no freedom, (especially Juliet being married off to an old dude named Paris) who just wanted to bang kind of iconic?? And despite Romeo being the villain of this book it was like meh, I get it but I also don't).

All I want to read is a Benvolio x Mercutio fanfic so maybe this author can give us that if they do more Romeo & Juliet renditions!!

Rosaline falls for the charming Romeo just as she discovers her alternative is a life in a nunnery. However,Romeo is not the romantic hero that we've been led to believe and things quickly take a turn ...

This book has such an interesting premise and really makes you thing about this story that we've been told for years is the ultimate romance. Unfortunately, I found it very slow and felt it dragged a lot at points. A real shame, because with a punchier plot I think it could have been really special!

Thank you to the publisher for providing a review copy

Not a retelling, but an untelling - and a different point of view that you’ve probably never heard of before!

I loved this. Seeing Juliette for what she was- a child.

Instead of a romantic tragedy, a true tragedy.

I don’t want to spoil it- but this was great. Empowering women empowering younger women.

Thanks to NetGalley for allowing me to have an arc in exchange for my honest review.

I enjoyed this feminist retelling of classic Romeo and Juliet. It started out rather slow but improved about halfway through as the characters evolved. I loved the modern take and found Rosaline to be much more interesting than Juliet.
Thank you to NetGalley for the advanced copy.

Thank you NetGalley for the eARC. I am a lover of history so to hear this story from another perspective was right up my alley! Once i started i could not put it down! Romeo was a man-whore!?! Yes we knew there was Rosaline before Juliet but wow! This story was so captivating I encourage all to read it!

We get so little of Rosaline in "Romeo and Juliet" but in this book she takes center stage. This was a slow start but a fantastic finish.

Before there was Romeo and Juliet there was Romeo and Rosaline.. and Romeo and several other women. This modern retelling of a classic everyone knows paints Romeo in a new light: not as a star-crossed lover but a man who leaves nothing but heartbreak and chaos in his wake.

We also get a new appreciation for Rosaline - a lonely young woman who first falls for Romeo's charms but quickly realizes the truth of him & his compatriots and does everything she can to prevent the ending of R & J we all know.

This book truly got better as it went along -- the last 40% we really got to see Rosaline's strength and voice and it turned it from a three star to a four star for me. Shakespeare lovers will recognize some of the lines and the themes in this book but its a fresh, modern take with different main characters and storylines that I really enjoyed.

For a character that's described with only one word ("fair") in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the Rosaline in this book sure gets a personality and quirks and looks that don't really belong to her but are lifted from other heroines. It's a pastiche with a questionable premise and relies on villainising Romeo and infantilising Juliet to build up Rosaline's character, and I couldn't enjoy the story.

did not finish. fair rosaline had a wonderful concept, but the writing style just didn't click with me. however, i'm another reader will enjoy this one more than i did.

Review in progress and to come.

I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley and am voluntarily leaving a review

I was drawn in by the concept of a retelling of Romeo and Juliet through a woman’s perspective, and this did not disappoint.

I will admit, I struggled with how slow the first 30% of the book read. Glad I persevered, because the pace picks up and I devoured the remainder of the book.

Rosaline is a beautifully written character, developing from a besotted teen to a crusader against predatory men. This book makes me want to read a feminist retelling of all of Shakespeare’s work.

I love how FAIR ROSALINE turns the traditional story on its head and gives us a fresh new viewpoint. Solomons does a great job with pacing and keeping the reader's interest as the storyline develops. Her extensive research is incorporated seamlessly, and the scenes are evocative and transportive.

Due to the ages of the characters, at times this feels more like a YA novel than one for adults. However, ultimately this means it should appeal to a wide range of audience.

The premise of this book immediately grasped my attention. Although she's a character in Romeo and Juliet, we learn very little about Rosaline except that she chose to remain chaste. I was very excited to get to read this version of her story, and I really wanted to like it more than I did, but there were certain things that I believe took away from it. I personally loved the style of the prose, however, the occasional curse word spoiled its beauty.

The story starts off rather slow until Romeo enters the story, and even then it takes a bit longer to truly pick up its pace. I can somewhat understand, especially after what transpired, why Rosaline would have blamed herself. However, the constant blame she placed on herself was a bit melodramatic. If anything went remotely wrong, she blamed it on herself, even if the tragedy was a result of someone else's action. This, and the constant running throughout Verona on Rosaline's part, was just exhausting to read.

I will say that I enjoyed seeing Dante Alighieri incorporated in certain passages, being that the story is suppose to take place in Italy. Also, I loved the symbolism of the bees and honey throughout the narrative. In my opinion, Fair Rosaline could have been condensed into a novella, and it still would have been just as impactful.

Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is often seen as the gold standard of young love. I myself was swept up in the utter romantic tragedy of it all, having read the play as a freshman in high school. It brings me no joy to realize now, decades later, that Romeo and Juliet defined love for me as a teenage girl, sending me down a path that perhaps I would not have taken had I not been as young and impressionable as 13 year old Juliet was herself, when reading it.

Turns out I am not alone in blaming Romeo and Juliet for all of my foolish romantic inclinations. In the author's note of Fair Rosaline, Natasha Solomons shares that she too defined romantic love by what she read in Romeo and Juliet. However, while many of us just lament on how Shakespeare's infamous play fooled us as young girls, Solomons takes things one step further, reimagining the iconic love story as something much more dark and deadly. Solomons dares you to consider that perhaps in fair Verona, where we lay our scene, things were not as they have seemed for centuries. What if Juliet was not loved by Romeo, but consumed? What if Romeo was a predator, and Juliet was his prey?

Get ready to question everything you have ever believed about Romeo and Juliet when you read Fair Rosaline! Solomons points out that while Juliet was identified as being just 13 in Shakespeare's work, Romeo's age was never disclosed; thus making her recreation of him as a nefarious older man hellbent on defiling young girls and bending them to his will quite plausible.

Fair Rosaline is told through the eyes of Rosaline, Juliet's cousin who was Romeo's love interest before he set his gaze upon Juliet at the Capulet ball. Solomons fleshes out Rosaline, giving her a story beyond the mere mention of her in the original work. Why did Romeo move on so quickly after Rosaline "broke his heart?" Could it be that this is just his way ... seducing girls and leaving them behind, ruined in his wake?

Fair Rosaline is a highly imaginative, captivating retelling of one of the best known romances of all time. In today's world where toxicity in relationships is now regularly spoken of and exposed for what it is, Fair Rosaline is a Romeo and Juliet story for the modern times. For anyone fed up with the lies you were sold about love, this is the Romeo and Juliet you want, that you need.

Thanks so much to NetGalley and SourceBooks Landmark for an advance readers copy, in exchange for an honest review. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I enjoyed the premise: a retelling of Romeo and Juliet but from another perspective. It was fresh and intriguing.

*Note: This ARC review will be posted on my tumblr blog on August 12th, a month before the book is published.

Summary:
This is a twist on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet from Rosaline's point of view. Rosaline Capulet is on the precipice of being sent away to a nunnery for good, so she decides to take life by the reins while she can. In doing so, she meets Romeo and has a brief affair with him. But when Romeo's true colors are revealed and he turns his wandering eye on her cousin Juliet, Rosaline has no choice but to stop him.

Review:
So all the sex in this book can be classified as dub-con as Rosaline is underage— I thought this was worth putting out there right off the bat. This is also not a historical romance; it's closer to historical fiction, and really well-written historical fiction at that. The descriptions are lush and lyrical, and you really get a fuller sense of the Verona Shakespeare might have imagined (he was very taken with Italy as a setting, but never visited, according to Natasha's author's note).

I loved the characterization of Rosaline. Rosaline's mother has just died, and she's faced with being sent to a nunnery rather than being married off. For a relatively outspoken and forthright teenager (she's fifteen? or sixteen?), it's a difficult situation to accept, so her decision to take these twelve days before she's sent away and throw caution to the wind totally makes sense. I also really liked her relationship with Juliet as well as Tybalt. Natasha humanized both of them, and even if Rosaline/Tybalt as a concept was a little jarring to read, I was on their side.

What was a little more difficult to read was Romeo's characterization: He is written as a sexual predator. Like sure, he's smooth and charming in a way I never quite got into in Shakespeare's original work, but it did come across here (at first at least), but you read the way he behaves with Rosaline and it's textbook predatory behavior: the love bombing, the manipulations, plying her with alcohol before sex, "forbidding" her from seeing family, promising he'll marry her, etc.. I was shocked when Rosaline described him up close as having a few grey hairs, and I was like, how old is this man??

Romeo's sins don't end there either. His trifling with girls is actually a part of a wider, more horrific conspiracy. And Friar Laurence is involved 😬. By the end of the story, a lot of the events are carried out similarly to the original text, with Rosaline watching it all go down, but she's no longer a passive observer.

Overall:
I read Romeo and Juliet in 9th grade and didn't think much of it, but reading Fair Rosaline actually made me revise my stance on a lot of the actions characters in the book took. Now, I'm more inclined to give them some grace because they were teenagers. That too, teenagers facing some very grown-up decisions. Remember, Juliet was going to be betrothed to Count Paris, a much older man, in the original text. No wonder she took the leap with Romeo! Similarly in this book, Rosaline had just lost her mother, and was likely going to be sent to a nunnery for the rest of her life by her father. It actually makes sense she'd meet and sleep with a guy she just met because again, teenagers. The adults in this story are complicit in a lot of the harm that comes to their children.

All that being said, it was.... definitely a Choice for Natasha to write Romeo a) as old as he was (we don't know how old he is in the original but he's definitely on the older end of the spectrum here) and b) turn a character that seems fuckboy-ish at worst in the original play into an absolute monster, one who knows exactly what he's doing. It's an interesting interpretation, because it turns a cautionary tale into one with an outright villain and his victims. I'm reserving my judgement on exactly what this sort of interpretation means in the broader context of Romeo and Juliet adaptations as a whole, but by itself, I can't deny it was a pretty great book.

Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my review.