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Romeo & Juliet & Vampires (2010)

by Claudia Gabel(Favorite Author)

3.5 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0061976245 (ISBN13: 9780061976247)

languge

English

genre

Romance

publisher

HarperCollins

review 1: All right, people. I almost never do this. In fact, I can't think of a book I've read other than the one I'm about to review where I've done this. But I actually picked up a book, read about 30 pages, and then debated whether to set it on fire or feed it to my deadly piranhas. This is the only book that's ever provoked me that way. And I have read many a book that was badly done, but never one that disappointed me so much.I am referring to Romeo and Juliet and Vampires, supposedly adapted from Shakespeare by Claudia Gabel.Now, I'm sure we all remember that big craze from a few years back, starting with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, followed by books like Little Vampire Women, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the Undead, and Wuthering Bites. I haven't read all of those, ... morebut I have read P&P&Z as well as Little Vampire Women, and they were cute and well done and really funny.This book was not cute. This book was not funny. This book was not well done. This book was stupid, and I do not use that word lightly in a professional review.Here's why I couldn't get past the first thirty pages.1) The language. Romeo, Benvolio, and Mercutio are horsing around in a very early scene and Mercutio calls Romeo a fat cow. I'm serious. He calls him a fat cow.Now, these are boys. Girls call each other cows, and guys call girls cows, but I have never heard of a boy calling another boy a fat cow. If a boy did call another boy that, they'd be laughed at and humiliated for coming up with such a pathetic piece of not-so-witty repartee.Not only that, but during this time period, these boys were considered to be on the cusp of becoming men. So you'd expect a little more maturity in their insults. I mean, it's not like Romeo and Mercutio don't rag the crud out of each other. They did. Hence why Romeo says things like, "They jest at scars but never felt the wound" (referring to their teasing about his being in love). But it would be on the level of a man, not a three-year-old at their first day of preschool.Also, people did not speak back then as modern teens speak now. Romeo did not use words like "douche bag" and Mercutio did not use words like "dill-weed." That's just common sense. Not that the dialogue has to be all thee, thou, thy, and wherefore, but there's a way to blend the two. Historical fiction is popular among teens, so it's not like people can't get into a slightly more formal language style.And you can modernize a historical story without destroying its authenticity. Look at A Knight's Tale with Heath Ledger. Quite a bit of modernizing in that, but the language was old-style in a lot of it, and yet it was still popular! Not only that, but the modern dialogue in this book didn’t even feel like natural dialogue anyway. So what was the point of having it in the first place?I'm sorry, but this author's insertion of (pathetic and improperly applied) modern slang feels like condescension to the reader to me, as if she thinks we're too uneducated to understand what the characters are saying unless she brings it down to basically a preschool level. I rarely get offended by a book, but the badly done language bugged the heck out of me.2) The incredibly hokey portrayal of vampires. In R&J&V, Juliet and all the Capulets are vampires. I'm okay with that. I love vampires. But the vamps in this book are more ridonculous and campy than even the 1930's Dracula with Bela Lugosi and the rubber bat. The effect is muted in Juliet, because she's not a full vampire yet, but you see it in Lady Capulet.First of all, Lady C has crimson eyes. By itself, I could take it. But she's also got a prominent widow's peak, dark hair, fangs that don't retract, and she's so pale that she's sallow. She's like, tallow-colored. She's jaundiced-looking.Also, she dresses like Elvira or Morticia Addams in the clingy dress with the tendrils on the hems, including a little cape that serves no purpose except to look vampy and doesn't even fall all the way to her feet.Add onto that the way she enters and leaves the room during the scene where in the play Juliet's mom is like, "Speak briefly: can you like of Paris's love?" In the book, she comes in with her cape draped along her forearm and her forearm in front of her face, floating six or so inches off the ground. Why is she floating? I have NO idea. And she never really stops. It's said that Juliet will start floating too after she becomes a full-fledged vampire.So basically Claudia Gabel grabbed every schticky, icky, vampy stereotype from those campy movies made in the 1930s-70s and smushed them all together. Maybe she meant it to be funny, like a parody or something…but it wasn't. It wasn't satirical, it wasn't parody-funny, it wasn't funny in any way. It was ridiculous. It's like if one of those caricature sketch-artists off the street looked at Lady Capulet and she said, "Draw me as one of the fiendish undead!"I love vampires. I love all the different variations found in literature. I've read "The Night Flyer" by Stephen King, PN Elrod's novels about her vampire detective, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, Fred Saberhagen's Dracula books, Nina Kiraly's Mina, Jessica's Guide to Dating on the Dark Side, even the totally adorable novel Bloodthirsty. And I've watched all kinds of movies, from The Hunger to The Lost Boys to Van Helsing to Dracula 2000. And they were all so much better than this. BBC's Young Dracula, The Little Vampire…even Twilight was better, and the sparkly bloodsucking dudes in Twilight aren't even real vampires. That's just sad.3) Finally, how Juliet has to become a vampire: she has to bite and kill someone. So basically she's given a choice by the author to either give up everyone she loves - her parents, her other family - as well as the life she's known all this time in order to do what's right and not murder an innocent person (it never occurs to her to go after a rapist or a killer)…or she kills someone and becomes evil.Now, if this book wasn't so hokey, this plotline would be perfect. It would be fine. It would totally work. But you can't take a serious plotline like this, one fraught with emotional introspection and seriously tough choices, and then be like, "And now let's add some crack-acid to liven things up even though it makes people wanna say, 'Go home, book. You're drunk.' Just 'cause we can."You can't take a plotline this serious, this potentially dynamic, this potentially beautiful, and slather it with all the stupidity heaped up in the first chapter. And if that's the author's way of being like, "Ha, you must wade through the crud to get to the good stuff," well then shame on her, because that's not how it works, since someone had to shell out money for that book to be available (in this case the library, or whoever donated the book). So I hope that wasn’t why she did that. I doubt it was, actually, but I like to cover my bases. Whatever her reason - she just didn't know any better, she didn't care, whatever - I couldn't finish this book.So, I'm sorry but this book is 0 stars from me. I literally would have to be paid in order to read it, and it would have to be upwards of $30 because I'm a really busy individual. The only thing I've ever read that was worse than this was a fanfic (the infamous "My Immortal" about Harry Potter). That's saying a lot.- LA Knight
review 2: What if all the Capulets were vampires, and all the Montagues were vampire hunters? Juliet Capulet is about to turn 16, and on that day she will become a vampire--a thing she dreads and abhors. Romeo Montague comes from a family that has spent their life hunting Capulets, until the Prince's recent peace forced both families to make nice. That suits Romeo fine, as he has no interest in killing anyone. Then he meets Juliet at the Capulet ball, when she is still human, and the story takes its course from there...or does it?Despite the incredibly cheesy cover, this is a non-humorous, pretty straight-up retelling of the tale if the Capulets really were vampires. The characters have the same personalities as in the play, though of course Romeo and Juliet are more politically correct, and the setting has been moved to the Carpathian Mountains. The writing is good, if not stunning, and moves along at a speedy clip (with a few unlikely coincidences to help things along). Even though I don't like vampires, I found myself respecting the effort here, and thought the author did a good job in transposing the tale. less

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