Romeo vs. Juliet Wild Rose Press

REVIEWED BY:

SCORE:

Author: Laura Hogg
Publisher: Wild Rose Press

REVIEW:

This book has one of the most intriguing opening chapters I’ve ever read. It starts straight into the action – eighteen year-old Josephine waking from a nightmare to see her husband – nineteen year-old Ambrose, who is originally from sixteenth century England, complete with Shakespearian language – saying goodbye and vanishing into a time portal. Josephine summons the portal keeper, Ambrose’s boss, and challenges him. The portal keeper has ordered Ambrose to undertake various assassination missions in different time periods, and Josephine isn’t happy about it.

So they strike a deal. The portal keeper will allow Josephine to arrive on the scene of Ambrose’s next kill ahead of him – and it’s up to her to make sure that the course of history as she knows it isn’t altered. Her task is full of risks – and of course, it pits her against her husband, who isn’t too pleased with the arrangement. Using the portal can also bring about memory loss – a plot device used to devastating effect throughout the course of the book.

Josephine also has to contend with a rival for Ambrose’s affections, the spoiled and fabulously bitchy Lady Huntley, a woman who won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.

There are two parts to this book. In the first part, we meet Josephine properly – a bored, unfulfilled shop assistant who asks herself questions like: Who the hell needed cheap plastic junk littering up their houses anyway? And why did vegetables cost twice as much as the food that will give you cancer? An orphan, Josephine longs for True Love and a secure relationship, but all the guys she’s dated so far have been losers.

On her eighteenth birthday, her best friend takes her to see a fortune-teller, who foresees a great and epic love affair and also extreme danger. When a gorgeous young man turns up at her workplace, Josephine is smitten. He sends her a ticket to a Renaissance festival, and with help from her aunt, a re-enactment fan, she attends and meets Ambrose – who’s been waiting for her for centuries.

Ambrose takes Josephine through the time portal to Elizabethan England, where he acts as an emissary for the queen. He explains that he can travel to different time periods, from the court of Cleopatra to 1960s America and far into the future. Whilst in England, Josephine is visited by her future great-granddaughter, Melissa, a fellow time-traveller who begs her not to have children with Ambrose.

Melissa explains that her life in the twentieth/twenty-first century is horrific, and that she’s unable to have children of her own. Each time she tries to alter history, Melissa finds herself in a position where her abdomen is seriously injured. Her suffering is so much that she’s reached the point where she’s literally asking not to be born – but when Josephine puts Melissa’s request to Ambrose, he refuses. He tells her they must have children, but he can’t tell her why. Melissa says that she’ll do everything in her power to prevent Josephine from conceiving or carrying a baby to term.

With the vicious Lady Huntley on her tail and the threat from her own great-granddaughter, the second half of the book sees Josephine embark on her mission through time to undo the damage done by Ambrose. Her travels with the portal keeper enable her to experience key points of Ambrose’s life before he met her – some hilarious, some heart-wrenching – while their once perfect relationship begins to fall apart.

Will Josephine be able to turn back time, literally and figuratively, and not only save history but also her marriage? Will Melissa succeed in erasing herself from history? And will Lady Huntley ever get her comeuppance?

It’s difficult to describe this book, as it crosses so many genres – time travel, romance, historical, contemporary, action – and at the same time it defies any attempt at labelling. It’s fresh, it’s different, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. This is a good thing. A very good thing. I’m seriously impressed by how well Ms Hogg juggles so many plot-balls in the air without letting a single one drop.

I’m not sure if it’s being marketed as a Young Adult novel or not, but it would make an awesome addition to the genre.

This is a long story – 374 pages – but the pacing remains consistent throughout. I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting.

I loved the detail about the Renaissance festival – I felt as if I were actually there – and the author displays an impressive knowledge of historical minutiae for the scenes in Elizabethan England. I’m also impressed by the way Ms Hogg manages to keep Ambrose’s sixteenth century speech patterns intact all the way through the book – surely no mean feat!

There are some lovely exchanges between the characters as Josephine adapts to her time-travelling life. My favourite historical-cultural misunderstanding was Ambrose’s use of the word ‘die’ in a sexual sense. Josephine takes it literally and worries that he wants to kill her. Fortunately he manages to explain without totally ruining the moment…

Favourite line: when Ambrose is studying a billboard, he asks: “The artwork on thine advertisements. The public canvasses. Dost thou no longer have museums?”

And my favourite exchange between Josephine and Ambrose:

“Th…you art a rogue,” I muttered playfully.He grinned and raised his brow. “Didest thou harken that expression in the street?”“No, I read it in a hot romance novel.”

Ms Hogg manages to educate the reader about the Renaissance world without it sounding like a history lesson. Seen through Josephine’s wondering gaze, everything new and strange is explained quite naturally, really drawing the reader into the story.

The negatives: The only thing I can find to criticise comes in the second half of the book, when Josephine jumps in and out of different time periods. Occasionally I did find it hard to follow what was going on, but to be fair to the author, in a book this length with so many dangling plot threads to resolve, and with the complexity of the time-travel issue, it would be almost impossible to present the narrative in simple terms. It didn’t lessen my enjoyment of the story, but it did make my head spin a little!

The scope of Romeo vs Juliet is enormous. In addition to being an entertaining read, an epic love story and a race against time, it also raises some questions for those readers who like to delve a little deeper beneath the surface. If you could go back in time and kill someone to avert a crisis, would you do it? You may think the answer is straightforward, but as Ms Hogg shows, time is flexible and infinite, and history is cyclical.

Touching, tender, romantic and sweet – but most of all, this book is truly unique, a real shining star in a crowded market. I’d recommend this to anyone.