As I’ve mentioned in reviews before, I am a sucker for Romeo and Juliet retellings/reimaginings, particularly ones where Romeo is, for lack of a better word, a total douchebag. Fair Rosaline absolutely nailed it in many ways, but Romeo’s villainy is definitely top of the list. It did take me a little bit to hit my stride with this book, but once Rosaline met Romeo, I was pretty well hooked. I absolutely loved how Rosaline was written. She was strong and loving, but also a little naive in the ways of love which made perfect sense for a young girl in that time. Perfect prey for Solomons’ charming and predatory Romeo. However, seeing her recognize all of his little red flags, even in the height of her love for him, really demonstrated how love, especially first love, can truly blind us and we can find all sorts of excuses for bad behavior. Also, I loved the way Tybalt was written. He was still hot headed, quick to anger Tybalt, but he had a softer side, a loving nature for his family and those he cared for. Honestly, I thought this was one of the better R&J retellings I’ve ever read. It’s certainly an interesting take from Rosaline’s POV and reiterates the fact that Romeo and Juliet were never meant to be a love story, they were meant to be a tragedy.
TW: death, violence, pedophilia

Thank you to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for a digital reader’s copy in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark for access to this title. All opinions expressed are my own.

I know that I cannot resist a Romeo and Juliet-inspired novel. In her upcoming September release, Natasha Solomons gives Shakespeare fans a well-developed back story of Rosaline Capulet. You remember, right? The girl that Romeo Montague was enamored with be for falling in love with Juliet Capulet.

As the story begins, Rosaline is mourning the loss of her beloved mother, the latest victim of the plague that ravages most of Europe. On the heels of this, her father declares that Rosaline is destined for a life in the nunnery and her days at the family estate are numbered. But when Rosaline falls in love with the seductive Romeo, she wonders if she can escape her fate. But nothing can prepare Rosaline for discovering who Romeo really is.

LOVE. LOVE. LOVE. Once I began this story, I became immune to all my surroundings. Breakfast dishes idled, laundry waited impatiently, and the man and dog of the house wondered what could be more important than them.

I was originally going to give this a 4 star but because of the ending of the novel I am bumping it up to a 5 star.

Expected Publication Date 12/09/23
Goodreads Review 04/09/23

4 Stars
I wasn’t sure how I would feel about this book going into it, but I ended up liking this book a lot. After reading this I see the story of Romeo and Juliet in a whole different light… he moved so quickly from Rosaline to Juliet and Juliet’s nurse isn’t as helpful as I thought. I loved getting to read more about characters like Rosaline and Tybalt, that you didn’t get to hear about in Romeo and Juliet… Rosaline was an icon and Tybalt was so sweet. This was a solid read and I definitely recommend this.

I'm a huge fan of retellings, especially retellings where a minor character is given a voice. I love that Rosaline is given a feminist makeover. This book is well-plotted and lushly written.

This book has a great premise, but was poorly executed. I love the idea of centering a vengeful Rosaline, but it didn’t have to villainize Romeo to do it. I can see making him a bit flippant and flaky with his affections, but not outright manipulative And to make him a pedo, when most interpretations suggest that both Romeo *and* Juliet were youthful and stupid? And the pedophile ring is taking it a step too far…although I will admit that considering what Catholic priests have gotten away with, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. The only redeeming feature is that Tybalt is interesting, and I liked his relationship with Rosaline. Shame he still had to die.

This retelling is absolutely captivating! Having studied this well known set of characters in many ways and for many years, I found this compelling as well as fascinating! I was hooked from the beginning and found myself thinking about these well-known in characters I have never considered. I cannot wait to share this with many patrons as I am sure they will absorb it fully in the manner that I did! Highly recommended...

This is such an interesting retelling of the typical Romeo and Juliet story. It has always been noted that before Juliet there was Rosaline but this gives us an interesting backstory and an unusual ending that makes you hope. It's also interesting to see societal constructs and Romeo cast as the true villains of the tale.

If you enjoy retellings and are okay with characters being vastly different than how you have previously known them, give this book a go!

I initially related to Rosaline’s character of falling head over heels for someone, willing to risk it all and being betrayed. Feeling strung along. But by the time we got around to Romeo and Juliet, I was sick to my stomach.

Such an interesting take on a story we all think we know. Definitely give this a read.

Rosalie loses her mother, but proves still to be a determined you woman who is not at all set to move forward with the life that has been planned out for her.

What was the last ARC you read? For me it was the INCREDIBLE Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons.

This book is very poignant and most certainly an untelling of the well known tale. Growing up, I always saw Romeo and Juliet as the classic case of star crossed lovers, just not fated to be, but this story throws a new, darker perspective on things.

The book starts strong at the funeral of Rosaline’s mother and really cements Rosaline’s loving, but determined, personality. She was a great character to follow and very likable.

As the tale progresses we begin to see Romeo as the villain, not the perfect, dreamy Leonardo Di Caprio esque dreamboat we all idolized as teenagers. Although surprising at first, the villain portrayal felt accurate and very believable. There is a vein of sadness and tragedy through the book as we go through heartbreak with Rosaline and the death of Tybalt. But there is joy in the ending too, despite the ominous cloud of the nunnery hanging over the book, as our heroine discovers her bravery and desire to save her family.

Ultimately it was a very cool book to read. The writing was gorgeous and there are so many romantic gems hidden in the text. The style felt true to the era while still being easy to follow and read. I loved seeing the quotes from the original play in there too and they really grounded the novel.

If you enjoyed reading Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell or Ithaca by Claire North then I think you will really enjoy this!

Fair Rosaline releases on 9/12/2023 so get it on preorder now or set up reminders on Libby!

Thanks to @netgalley , @natashasolomonsauthor and @bookmarked for this eARC. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

This novel explores the timeless tragedy of Romeo and Juliet with raw sincerity through the eyes of Romeo’s discarded lover Rosaline.

A willful and determined young woman in her own right, Rosaline is bound to join a convent but yearns to experience life in color. She is entranced by the older Romeo, whose grand declarations of love seem a bit too practiced. When she ultimately denies him and he turns his attentions on Juliet, Rosaline knows she must do all she can to protect her 13 year old cousin from the predatory Romeo

This novel is rich with descriptions of both setting and emotion, pulling the reader into a fictionalized Italy where the streets hum with activity and the heart aches with a forbidden love. Rosaline is plagued by her secret affection for Romeo even as pestilence haunts the city. Natasha Solomons expertly handles the complex emotions of Rosaline, the war between duty and desire.

Love is not what it seems, with Romeo’s fickle affections pulling Rosalie away from the steadfast love of her cousin Tybalt. The Capulet adults are aloof and unfeeling, more interested in profiting from their daughters than protecting them from dangerous men like Romeo

This novel is truly superb, revealing that the most well-known love story in literature is in fact a tragedy of discarded and neglected women. But with Rosaline at the helm, can this ship might steer toward a different path than what readers have come to expect from “Romeo and Juliet”

🦇 Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons Book Review 🦇

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

❝ "Our meeting was like lightning, so bright and sudden that the whole world was lit. But then lighting also in an instant vanishes." ❞

❓ #QOTD What story would you want to read from a female's perspective? ❓

🦇 How much of Romeo and Juliet's story was told through the eyes of men? In Rosaline's version, he's just as quick to fall in love with her. After losing her mother, Rosaline is promised not to a husband, but to a convent. She only has days to make the most of her free life. Romeo's candied words and poetic promises of a better future draw her in like a bee to pollen, but once he's ruined her and delayed their wedding, she realizes his behavior is predatory, poison. When Rosaline casts him aside, Romeo sets his pursuits on young Juliet. Can Rosaline save her fair cousin in time, or are they both ruined?

💜 Natasha Solomons' feminist untelling is a stunning, empowering, chilling accomplishment. She manages to weave a story both familiar and unwritten. In the original Romeo and Juliet, we're only told of Rosaline through the gaze of men. She's made to be a joke. Solomons' Rosaline (a lively, spirited fusion of Shakespeare's other Rosalines) refuses to be an offhand mention in someone else's story. Her version is so real and raw that, if the story were true, we'd all be inclined believe it (especially in this post-Me Too movement world). There's a dark subtext in Rosaline's version, though. If you're familiar with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet's age (not yet 14) is mentioned multiple times, whereas Romeo's is not mentioned once. We imagine them as young, star-crossed lovers, but what if Romeo was 20, 30? In this version, Romeo has a history of preying on young women, ruining them, and casting them aside, only for other men to take advantage of what remains. Despite the modern subtext, Solomons does a fantastic job of maintaining Shakespeare's lyrical prose in a way that's still easy to read. The smallest details breathe the city of Verona to life, making it vivid and engaging. The metaphor of Rosaline becoming physically dirty on the outside after Romeo sullied her from within was gut-wrenching.

🦇 As well-written as this untelling is, there's a constant melancholy to the entire story as Rosaline grieves for her mother. That melancholy makes it easy for us to understand why Rosaline is so enthralled by Romeo; he becomes her escape. However, it also becomes a weight. It's also difficult to fall for Romeo the way Rosaline does. There are INSTANT red flags the moment they cross paths, and they become more obvious with every interaction. It almost takes too long for Rosaline to realize his honied words are poison. The reveal that the Friar is using Romeo to his advantage--and to the advantage of most men in Verona--felt a bit too much as well. However, Solomons excels at remaining true to the original story while posing it from a fresh lens.

🦇 Recommended to anyone who loves a good retelling. This story is empowering, thought-provoking, and a reminder that most of history was told through the lenses of men.

✨ The Vibes ✨
🌹 Speakspeare Retelling
🌹 Lyrical Prose
🌹 Feminist Revision
🌹 Not a Love Story
🌹 Vivid and Descriptive

🦇 Major thanks to the author @natashasolomonsauthor and publisher @sourcebooks / @bookmarked for providing an ARC of this book via Netgalley. 🥰 This does not affect my opinion regarding the book. #FairRosaline #Sourcebooks #SourcebooksLandmark

I really enjoyed this exploration of a "minor" character in Shakespeare's play, and how she moves through grief about her mother to dealing with the fickle nature of young men (particularly Romeo himself). I would suggest this to reader who enjoy adaptations of Renaissance literature, and/or who enjoy young adult fiction about young women finding their place in the world. This novel does both.

This was a brilliant story line and I was completely absorbed in this. This is a great romeo and juliet retelling and I think it's the best retelling I've read. This was so good!
I just reviewed Fair Rosaline by Natasha Solomons. #NetGalley
[NetGalley URL]

It's all the rage lately to re-imagine beloved characters from classic books and give them new life, new adventures and sometimes to right the wrongs perpetrated upon them by their original creators, but is this fair to the reader? One assumes that the reader has read the original text and realizes that this next iteration is only a teasing out of possibilities, but what if they haven't? I suppose the irony of Fair Rosaline is that Shakespeare did the very same thing. Shakespeare's source material were the classics of his time that he mined to create enduring characters relevant in his time and now in ours. So instead of the question of fairness to the reader or the possibility of confusion the real question becomes does Solomons' Fair Rosaline impart wisdom for today's reader. I say yes.

Fair Rosaline tells the story of Romeo's first love, Rosaline, Juliet's cousin. We never meet Rosaline in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet but here Solomons gives her life and agency to expose the corruption of patriarchy and the imbalance of power that would have a grown man(Romeo) marrying a 13 year old girl(Juliet) and the world believing it a love story.

Solomons delves into the original character motives and questions our longstanding belief that such characters were benevolent, such as Friar Lawrence, should he really be helping an older man marry a child? And although generations of readers have questioned the role of Juliet's parents Solomons spares no mercy casting both her mother and her father as selfish and unfeeling social climbers.

I loved this novel. Solomons has taken a well known and well loved story and made it reflective of our current social conversations around women's rights and power. Well done.

Overall, I enjoyed this book as a new perspective and retelling of a story we all know. The language was a little confusing because it almost couldn't decide what it wanted to be - old or new? However, I do think that will make this a more approachable book for younger readers. I think I went in expecting a little more humor, and found it to be very "on the nose" so to speak. I did enjoy Tybalt being a more prominent character in this retelling, as well.

Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced in exchange for an honest review.

I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet when I was at a very impressionable age and I wasn’t sure I wanted an “untelling” of the story. But Natasha Solomons is one of my favorite novelists, so I gave it a go. I couldn’t imagine how Rosaline might save Juliet from her fate and I assumed that whatever Rosaline did, the story would end as usual. Solomons hews pretty closely to the play’s plot basics, but she colors in a whole new background and shades the meaning of many of the lines in a different direction.

The book is almost like a mystery story as Rosaline slowly comes to learn of Romeo’s fickleness and fondness for seducing young girls—and of Friar Laurence’s motivations in his aid to his friend Romeo. (<spoiler>While another review says that Romeo has a role in Friar Laurence’s pedophile ring—i.e., to seduce, despoil and abandon young girls for Friar Laurence to turn over to the privileged members of the ring (à la Jeffrey Epstein)—my reading was that while Friar Laurence did, indeed, operate the pedophile ring, Romeo was not part of the ring. He seduced and abandoned the young girls, with no care about or interest in what happened to them afterward, but with no knowledge that his supposed friend, Friar Laurence, scooped up Romeo’s castoffs.</spoiler>) Rosaline’s strong personality means she concocts her own scheme to ensure that her (even) younger cousin Juliet doesn’t meet an even worse fate than seduction and abandonment.

Let’s get it right out there: this is a feminist story and may be polarizing. Solomons emphasizes how young women like Rosaline and Juliet had no power in their own lives. Rosaline’s father is going to send her to a convent despite her strong aversion to that life. Juliet’s parents plan to marry her off to a much older man, Paris, when she is still 13 years old and playing with dolls. Romeo preys on young girls (there are many others before Rosaline and Juliet) by giving them the illusion of someone who cares about them and their dreams and desires. A feminist “untelling” of Romeo and Juliet may offend some, and some will definitely find the idea of a 15th-century pedophile ring outlandish, but Solomons makes some good points about women’s lives in Verona at that time. Obviously it’s true that they had little opportunity to make their own life choices. Is it so hard to imagine a young woman with Rosaline’s or Juliet’s prospects naïvely grasping at an opportunity to escape with a Romeo? Is it so hard to imagine a corrupt priest titillated by his friend’s sexual exploits and the chance to gain personal power and influence by making his friend’s castoffs available to influential people? Neither is unimaginable to me. And it helps that Solomons makes the Verona of the period feel so real, with its oppressive heat and bugs, the stink of rot of all kinds, but lush beauty and ripeness as well.

As an avid Shakespeare fan, I was very interested in the premise behind this retelling. After all, is it not theater's fundamental purpose to hold a mirror up to the audience and reflect what is captured there? And, if that is true, shouldn't Shakespeare's universal themes only benefit from being refined for a modern audience?

However, coming out of this reading experience, I felt like this book couldn't decide what it wanted to be. A historical drama ala Maggie O'Farrell? A relatable retelling for the gen z generation? The language of the book itself reflected this uncertainty, oscillating between dramatic and #relatable. I also felt confused by Rosaline's character, like she wasn't fully realized. I suppose this makes sense, as I read that the author made her as a composite of many Shakespearean heroines, a good idea in theory, but I felt like her character needed more honing. She didn't seem fully real, instead like she slipped into one of three or four different shoes depending on what the scene demanded from her. I'm by no means a Shakespeare purist, but I didn't like the way Romeo was villainized. He is a very nuanced and morally grey character in the source material (like many of the Bard's heroes), so the author certainly had a lot to work with. However he felt very one note. Like the author's friend described the plot of Hamlet to her and she made a character based on that secondhand recollection.

Ultimately, this novel had a promising premise but didn't work for me because I didn't get the sense the author had a genuine and individual interpretation of the source material. It read as theater nerd wants you to think they understand classics better than they actually do (I know this type intimately, as I have a degree in theater and dramaturgy). It read as ingenuine and it didn't feel like it built off the source material. Overall I was quite disappointed in this. I went in really wanting to like this, and between the language and the characters I was hard-pressed to finish it. Maybe I'm being too harsh because I love the source material and think there's so much there, it just seems a pity this is what we got. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Ok, so I know Romeo and Juliet is a play by Shakespeare and not real, but this book wraps itself around the play like and glove and the reader almost believes it is real. Rosaline begins as a product of her time, but shows her true colors when she bargains with her father, goes to a party, meets a man and flirts with him--and then the next night sleeps with him, after all she only has a few days until she is to be locked up in a nunnery. But then this and that happens and she finds that it is left to her to set everything right. And so she does. In a convoluted plan (concocted with the Abbess of the nunnery, no less), she makes everything come out correctly although no one really knows it. The only thing I would like to know: will there be a part two? at one point the Abbess makes a comment about making the men of Verona pay for what they have done--I would really like to know how Rosaline and company would pull that off.

Since I love a good retelling of Shakespeare I was very excited for Fair Rosaline, especially since Rosaline was not fleshed out in the original work and ripe material for a novel. Rosaline is an older cousin of Juliet, another Capulet in the Capulet/Montague feud and Romeo’s original love.

The novel begins for Rosaline after her mother dies from the plague. She discovers that her father has relegated her to the nunnery and the novel takes place over the 12 days before she has to enter the convent. In this retelling, Romeo is a cad; a man who falls in love easily and just as easily leaves his women (well girls) behind after using them for his purposes. Once Rosaline realizes this she spends her time left trying to save Juliet from a similar fate.

I enjoyed the first half of the book but the romantic in me was a little thrown off by the character of Romeo in the story (I did enjoy a deeper character study of Tybalt though). I felt the book was a little slow and tried a little too hard to balance the language of the original work and be modern at the same time which came off as a bit awkward. It was a creative take on a classic and I’m glad I read it but it was not a memorable one for me.

3.5 stars

Thank you NetGalley and Sourcebooks Landmark for the advanced reader copy