Ophelia by Lisa M. Klein

 

I'm doing an audit on my book inventory, which is basically fancy-talk for "read all the book shit I have accumulated and see what I want to keep and what I want to sell/toss." OPHELIA is a book I bought over ten years ago back when I was still obsessed with YA. The idea of a Hamlet retelling that accorded Ophelia full agency was just too good to pass up. Especially since she's such a passive character in the play.

Here, we see Ophelia and Hamlet's love story and how they are schemers who end up playing people for fools, which ends up foreshadowing Hamlet's infamous "the play's the thing" scheme. We learn that they even secretly get married-- but they never tell anyone and Hamlet basically lets everyone think that she's just a spurned lover when he goes full emo, much to Ophelia's distress.

In OPHELIA, we learn that the madness was just an act and the suicide was also just an act-- she took a page out of Juliet's book with a "JK! It's just poison to make me look dead!" The third act ends up with her literally in a nunnery, which I only just realized is ironic AF. The nunnery part is really weird. Nuns are also kind of emo and boring.

I don't really know what to think about this book. I liked the romance part in the beginning and the court intrigue in the middle, but then it just falls apart with the dramatics and the nuns. This is a pretty mature work for YA and I don't really think younger teens would enjoy it at all, as the language and vocabulary is difficult and the mature themes are potentially disturbing (rape, faking your death, giving birth, poison in the ear, etc.). I feel like a solid 2.5 kind of covers how I feel about it. It was slightly better than okay but not enough to be good. I won't be keeping this one.

2.5 out of 5 stars