The Juliet Spell

I’m Juliet.

At least, I wanted to be.

So I did something stupid to make it happen.

Well, stupid and wonderful.

I wanted the role of Juliet more than anything. I studied hard. I gave a great reading for it—even with Bobby checking me out the whole time. I deserved the part.

I didn’t get it. So I decided to level the playing field, though I actually might have leveled the whole play. You see, since there aren’t any Success in Getting to Be Juliet in Your High School Play spells, I thought I’d cast the next best—a Fame spell. Good idea, right?

Yeah. Instead of bringing me a little fame, it brought me someone a little famous. Shakespeare. Well, Edmund Shakespeare. William’s younger brother.

Good thing he’s sweet and enthusiastic about helping me with the play...and—ahem—maybe a little bit hot. But he’s from the past. Way past. Cars amaze him—cars! And cell phones? Ugh.

Still, there’s something about him that’s making my eyes go star-crossed....

Will Romeo steal her heart before time steals him away?

About the author:

The life of Douglas Rees is not a subject he cares to get into deeply. “BORING,” he says. Nonetheless, he admits to having been born, and claims the event took place at March Air Force Base in California, “rather a long time ago now.”

At the age of twelve, he decided that he wanted to be a writer, and spent the next thirty-five years taking intermittent stabs at it. Meanwhile, he worked at various kinds of teaching, spent a year as a hospital orderly, drove something like an ambulance, washed dishes, took inventories, told stories and was part owner of a ballet school (he can’t dance). He got married, got divorced and got married again (to different people). In his midthirties he went to library school at Berkeley just before they closed it down (“Not my fault,” he insists), and he currently works as a young-adult librarian at the south end of San Francisco Bay. He has one wife
and too many cats.

Besides The Juliet Spell and Majix: Notes from a Serious Teen Witch, he has written nine other published books including Lightning Time, Smoking Mirror and Vampire High, which won various honors; and Grandy Thaxter’s Helper, Uncle Pirate and The Janus Gate, which didn’t. His favorite music is oatmeal cookies, his favorite food is turquoise. If you place him near a body of flowing water he will probably stare at it contentedly without wandering off until you want him again. This cannot be absolutely guaranteed, however. He is notorious for getting lost.

He prefers to plead the Twenty-First Amendment in answer to all other questions.