I wasn’t able to finish this one.

The pacing threw me off and I had to DNF around 27%.

Maybe I’ll be able to come back to it at another time.

I’ve already bought the audio version & it is as good as the print. I can’t wait to share this with my students next year. Just the opening description of living with the plague is going to draw them in in a completely new way. This is top tier writing that is couched in thoughtful research & creative story crafting. Love it!

I'm honestly a little conflicted in my review for this title. I'm not sure if that's because I wasn't sure what I was getting into when I requested the book. It went a way different way than I was expecting, but not in a bad way? I think the idea of giving a life and agency to Rosaline was super interesting and a modern way to look at the play. It gave me a new perspective and I'll be thinking about this book for quite a while.

I absolutely love Shakespeare, so as soon as I saw this I needed to read it. Thank you so much to the publisher and NetGalley for letting me read this ARC!! I thought this was such an interesting take on a perspective of Romeo and Juliet that we didn’t get from W. Shakespeare. I loved it from start to finish. Definitely worth reading if you enjoy Romeo and Juliet.

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for access to an eARC for Fair Rosaline in exchange for my honest review.

Due to personal reasons revolving around past traumas, I chose to avoid retellings of Romeo and Juliet for years, despite it being my favorite of Shakespeare's works when I was younger. But having forged a new love for the story with my best friend, I decided this year to give a few more movie and book retellings of the star-crossed lovers of Verona, and this one had me excited from the second I saw the title. Rosaline has always been a character I go back to when I do think of he play, despite her lack of a true appearance in the story and the shortage of references to Juliet's older cousin. Even when I first read Romeo and Juliet when I was a freshman in high school, I wondered what it must have been like for Rosaline to be the girl who Romeo cast aside and forgot in favor of her younger cousin.

The rising trend today of taking female characters who, for one reason or another, were not given as much depth as others in original and classic works and writing a retelling to give them more agency and purpose in the story is very close to my heart, and Natasha Solomons has only made it more so. Her decision to look a little harder at Romeo's fickle and flighty nature and to use it as a way to present and discuss the existence of predatory men both in the past and in our present while still showing so much love to the original play was incredible. I especially loved having the chance to see the world through the eyes of the Capulets more so rather than through the lens of Romeo and the Montagues as he presents it to Juliet. Falling in love with the character of Tybalt wasn't something I'd ever seen myself doing before now, but my heart was so full for him.

The decision, also, to combine multiple references to others Rosalines and Rosalinds in Shakespeare's other words to inspire her own portrayal of the character somewhat really showed the dedication that Solomons has to respecting the original work while also forging her own tale from its roots, and my *god* if the choice to give 'fair' Rosaline dark skin and moorish features to make a point of the overused compliments a man will pay to simply gain the adoration of a woman was *spectacular.* From beginning to end, the writing style and the story and especially the ending of this story had me falling back in love with Romeo and Juliet all over again even as she told a brand new terrifying story from the scraps she chose to take away from the play, and while it was a bit more literary in prose than most of the other books I read around the same time and therefore took me longer to get through, I can absolutely see myself picking up a copy for myself to read again one day.

As an admirer of Shakespeare, I was entranced with this take on Romeo, prior to Juliet and now featuring Rosalind. Interesting and spelling binding, this book was a delight. I just love when an author takes another spin on a classic and gives you another perspective or adds a "what if" factor to a story. Many thanks to #netgalley #natashasolomons #fairrosaline for the opportunity to read and review this book.

Really great book with amazing characters and a great plot. Was easy to get into and it was very engaging. This is a book that I can see a lot of people in YA enjoy. Swooning over the storyline!

thank you to netgalley for the advanced reading copy. I really enjoyed this and will be getting copies for my shop.

I wanted to like this book more than I did. I LOVE "Romeo and Juliet" so this retelling caught my attention but it fell a bit flat. I liked it, I just didn't love it. I wanted more from the characters and more from the storyline in general.

Very interesting read! The book pulled me in from the start and I wanted to see how it ended. Try it and see if this book is for you!

I enjoyed this retelling/reimagining of Romeo and Juliet. Rosaline completely made sense as a teenage girl falling for a mid-twenties man. The author really highlighted the age gaps between Rosaline and Romeo and again with Juliet and Romeo. I also loved the villainous aspect of Romeo and Friar Laurence. It upped the drama in a fun and believable way. Definitely not the love story everyone is used to but one more fitting for the modern day

I loved this book. It's not what I would call one of my usual reads, but it was a nice pallet cleanser and I very much enjoyed the story.

Thank you Net Galley for the advanced readers copy of this book. I think that I may have been the wrong target audience for this book. Normally I absolutely love an extension or retelling of classic stories. However, this one I just could not become immersed in.

I love this backstory to Romeo and Juliet about Romeo’s ex of Rosaline it was fun to read the story set before the most romantic story told by Shakespeare

Fair Rosaline is a bit of a twist on the classic Romeo and Juliet story, told from Rosaline’s point of view. The story opens with Rosaline being told she is going to be sent to a nunnery, falling into a brief affair with Romeo beforehand, and then trying to save her cousin, Juliet, when she realizes that Romeo has set his sights on her.

Overall, I think this book brought a fresh perspective to Romeo and Juliet and I enjoyed getting to see more developed personalities of some of my favorite characters. I was able to relate to the characters more in this story than I was in the original Shakespearean play and I think it was great to see Rosaline especially, who doesn’t have as large of a role in the play, have a lot of spunk and fire as the story goes on. I did think that some of the dialogue and language was a little awkward, as the Shakespearean style language seemed to be more interspersed, rather than seamlessly included. But, this was not enough to majorly detract from the story and I still enjoyed it.

I fell in love with this one as soon as I started the story. If you love the original tale then this one is going to bomb your heart as you read each page.

A clever reworking of Romeo and Juliet, with some decidedly modern day flourishes--this is a creative spin that will be a great fit for lovers of historical fiction and well-written romance. I am not sure that comparisons to Maggie O'Farrell's work are fair to this author, but certainly, they share a wonderful ability to re-imagine well known stories and create powerful characters. Thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.

Thank you to Sourcebooks Landmark and NetGalley for the ARC of this novel. I started this book with high hopes for the story to turn Romeo & Juliet on its head but I was disappointed. The whole plot still occurs in a short amount of days and some of the characters are much more fleshed out here than in the play but I did not enjoy Rosaline as a character. I also just could not enjoy the prose and started to skim pretty early just to hit the plot points and see where it may go. I will say I was likely influenced by other reviews I saw and their view. I do not recommend this book as it just did not satisfy. 2 stars.

Everyone knows of Romeo and Juliet. But before Juliet, there was Rosaline. In Shakespeare's play, Romeo's fickle adoration strays before we get to know much of anything about his former love. Who was she, and how does might she factor into arguably Shakespeare's most famous tragedy?

I've read a lot of 'retellings' recently, and this is one of my favorites. Not only is the prose resonant and evocative, Rosaline is a compelling heroine, lending us a unique and more human perspective on a story that, in my opinion, was always a little... well, farfetched. But through Rosaline's eyes, we see a Verona that is not a playground for entitled brats, but a city in the maelstrom of a plague: fetid, tumultuous, haunted. Our characters are not caricatures of emotive hyperbole, but people with whom we can identify, with troubles and cares that, while more pedestrian than a coup de foudre, encourage the reader to invest in the story.

Nowhere does this investment pay more dividends than with Rosaline. A modern heroine in a historic time, she is at once courageous and vulnerable. She is struggling to find freedom in a world and a time set on hemming in the liberties of women. At first, the affections of Romeo are a lifeline: an escape from imprisonment in a nunnery. But soon, Romeo's advances take on a predatory sheen. We see Rosaline wrestle with these shifting realizations and attempt to save herself and then Juliet. We root for her, even as she makes decisions we would not make in her stead. We see her for what she is: a young woman doing her best in a situation where all odds are against her.

Don't expect swashbuckling and swooning. This retelling of Romeo and Juliet is gritty and painful. But it's also immensely more interesting, and it will keep you thinking well past the last page.

I did not finish this title, I could not get over the misrepresentation of Shakespeare's characters. I fully expected the retelling to be far from the original, but this was unbelievably so. I found Rosaline to be deeply unlikeable and paranoid. In Rosaline's view every person in Verona is a pedophile and Juliet is a little lamb stumbling through. It all got a bit nauseating so I had to put the book down for good.