Hamlet, the Frat Bro, and His Awful Girlfriend

Falling for Hamlet by Michelle Ray

Pages: 348 Genre: YA retelling

Rating: 1.5 Star

Kindle Notes and Highlights

Ophelia is a senior at Elsinore High, dating her off-and-on-again boyfriend Prince Hamlet. So much of her life is already dominated by the whims of the crown, and she's still trying to find her footing with the relentless press and PR spins. But when Hamlet's beloved father dies and Hamlet begins to fall into a spiral of madness, he starts to become someone that Ophelia doesn't even recognize. She manages to stay alive and tell the tale in her own television interview, of course.

Spoiler warning? I guess? This book stays really loyal to "Hamlet" the play, so I am technically spoiling the book. But if you've read "Hamlet," you already know the major plot moments of this book. I spoil some of the differences (not including Ophelia being alive, which is how the book is marketed), but I don't think they're substantial enough to justify being considered spoilers. Regardless, this is your official warning, if you care. I would just recommend not reading this book instead.

I knew from the cover of this book that it was probably not going to be my thing, but because it's about "Hamlet," I decided to give it a shot anyway. I thought that perhaps it could be fun in an "early 2000s teen movie" kind of way. What I got instead was a lazy, reductive version of this play that talks down to its readers and shows a blatant disregard for the things that make the original so loved.

Ophelia's characterization was a mess. It felt as though the only thing the author cared about was a vague sense of 'girl power' that never quite felt like the feminist win it was seemingly trying to be. This version of Ophelia was directionless, constantly chose her boyfriend over her friends, blatantly used another love interest, and is sort of just annoying. We're repeatedly told that her struggle for independence and desire to be free from the expectations of the crown is her primary conflict, although I'd argue it never goes past the "telling" part seeing as she would mouth off and defy orders repeatedly depending exclusively on what the book needed her to do. She was inconsistent and obnoxious, failing both at being a victim of extreme manipulation and a girlboss who fights for her own destiny.

I've read other retellings that choose to portray Hamlet as an abusive boyfriend to her (which is a more than valid reading of the original text), so I know it can be done effectively. Unfortunately, despite that being the intended characterization of their relationship, this also never seems accurate. Hamlet's not exactly pleasant, but outside of the "get thee to a nunnery" conversation and a few other iffy conversations, he doesn't seem abusive to me. The problem is that Ophelia is abandoning every aspect of her life that isn't Hamlet — consciously and on purpose. She seems like a lovesick, immature teenager more akin to someone like Ariel from "The Little Mermaid" than someone being manipulated by her boyfriend. Especially when you see other characters (adults) blackmail and lie to her, it makes Hamlet's actions seem better in comparison.

Personally, I also found this to be a lazy interpretation of the character of Hamlet. Granted, I tend to have a more sympathetic view of him, but I recognize that in the original play there are things he does that are really bad, especially to Ophelia. But I never like it when authors also ignore the extreme, taxing situation he's in. You can build Ophelia up and even point out the abusive tendencies of her relationship with Hamlet and also not act like having the ghost of your dad tell you to kill you uncle who married your mom two months after your dad's death is just an everyday occurrence. This book doesn't do that.

And don't get me started on Horatio. Kind, loyal, rational Horatio — where have you gone? Because that is not the character I found in this book. First of all, this author made the decision to be carting Hamlet and Horatio back and forth to school the whole time instead of being stuck in the castle, for some reason, which made everything feel a little disconnected. But I think the only reason for this was so the author would have a "justification" for sidelining Horatio. We were told, repeatedly, that they were best friends, but for the first 75% of the book, Horatio would act like it was a chore to be around Hamlet, opting more frequently to be at school or just vaguely "elsewhere." Also, it's weird to give him an off-camera girlfriend (named Kim, because nothing about this book makes sense). It was another cheap way to distract him from the main Hamlet issues in a way that is not at all in the spirit of the play.

At the end of "Hamlet" by Shakespeare, Horatio is ready to die with Hamlet. Not even for him, because Hamlet's already on the ground dying. But as he is watching his best friend about to die, he is content to follow him as he is "more an antique Roman than a Dane," and Hamlet has to tell Horatio explicitly to keep living. It's a powerful moment and a touching display of feeling from Horatio. In this book, we don't get to see the climax, and instead Horatio texts Ophelia and says: "o gd. all r dead". Which is equally as eloquent and demonstrative of Horatio's heartfelt desperation as it was in Shakespeare's version.

You can probably see already that I wasn't a fan of the modernization either. It's not that I needed them to speak Shakespearean English: quite the opposite, in fact. The texting was fully unintelligible, and nothing will convince me it was authentic to the way teens texted in 2011. But these were modern characters speaking to each other in a modern context. Side characters had names like Kim and Lauren and Zara. The author says this was an intentional choice to create a distinction between the Hamlet world and Ophelia's outside world, but it just made the book feel disjointed and awkward. Especially when the characters would slip into Shakespearean language from the original script, which never felt well-integrated.

It felt exceptionally lazy. Instead of awkwardly shoving in the language that made sense when Shakespeare wrote it, why not reimagine it to fit your own characters in their unique contexts? Take the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. In this book, Hamlet is scribbling the phrases "to be" and "not to be" on a piece of paper; when questioned, he goes on to share the rest of the speech in awkwardly re-written modern language. The author says that she had him writing the iconic phrase because "having him say it out loud sounded too clunky" (from the Author's Note), but the whole thing felt clunky. What does the phrase "to be or not to be" mean to this 2011-Frat Bro-Hamlet other than it was something Hamlet-Proper said? Instead of jamming in the phrase just because it is iconic, it would've been a more powerful scene if the author had done genuine character work to understand This Hamlet, because it's not the words he says that people connect to, it's the message.

This is just one example: there are a good hand-full of times that language from the play is mashed directly into the story, and it never comes across well. Unfortunately, I imagine this is because the author had zero faith in her readers. Again, in the author's note she admitted that she felt the need to immediately follow another phrase with its colloquial translation "so readers knew what I meant." But people have been reading/viewing and understanding "Hamlet" for literal centuries. I do not need Hamlet dumbed down for me, and neither do the teenagers who are in the target demographic for this book (trust me: they're all reading it in school right now). It's not only an insult to your readers, it's an insult to the source material, which is never something you want to see from a retelling.

The most obvious change from the original play is that Ophelia gets to live in this one. And good for her! Truly! I just wish it had been done in a way that also made the character feel more whole, with real depth — something that the author criticizes Shakespeare for failing to do (a take that I strongly disagree with, but I digress). Ophelia may have gotten to live, but she was absent from most of the crucial scenes. This is excusable in the play, where she's a side character, but this is meant to be her story. Hamlet makes and executes plans and she only gets to be present for the fallback, her father dies in a different room and her entire arc surrounding that takes place isolated in a locked room, and — most unforgivably — she is absent for the whole climax of the book. Since she is meant to be dead at this point, she is in hiding, which means the whole mass murder scene happens while she is basically on Facetime, and she gets cut off before anyone dies. Never mind this being a retelling: that's unacceptable for any novel.

Honestly, everything about this book felt soulless and empty. This book didn't add anything new to the conversation surrounding Hamlet and Ophelia. It overexplained Shakespeare while disregarding the themes of suicide, power, complicated relationships, and madness that drew people to the original play in the first place. It seemed like the author simply didn't like "Hamlet" and was convinced she could write a better version. But if you're putting yourself in a writing competition with Shakespeare, you're always going to lose. Have some faith in your readers and tell the story you actually want to tell.