When You Were Mine

April 30, 2012
History forgot Rosaline, the girl Romeo loved before Juliet, and the clever premise of this underdeveloped but still satisfying romance is an updated imagining of Rosaline's story. Rose Caplet lives next door to Rob Montag, her male best friend who becomes something more as they begin senior year at their posh Southern California private school. But then Rose's estranged cousin, Juliet, and her family move back to town, and Rob is instantly smitten. The cousins were close before their families had a falling out for reasons Rose later discovers, and Rose is devastated by Juliet's betrayal. Serle's debut mirrors the plotting of the original play, but events are filtered through Rose's perspective, with Rob and Juliet kept at a distance. Tapping into familiar Shakespearian devices, Serle places Rob and Juliet in a school production of Macbeth; Rose's role as a stagehand enables her to eavesdrop on their stormy interactions. Though Rob and Juliet are disappointingly one-dimensional, Rose's pain and growth feel legitimate, and her love interest, Len, is distinctive. But it's Rose's longtime friendship with girlfriends Charlie and Olivia that form the heart of the story. Ages 14âup. Agent: Mollie Glick, Foundry Literary + Media.

April 1, 2012
Romeo and Juliet is recast as a love triangle set at a tony Southern California private school. Rosaline the narrator points out in the prologue that "before Juliet ever came into the picture," there was Rosaline, whom Romeo had initially gone to the ill-fated party to see. "Romeo didn't belong with Juliet; he belonged with me." Here Romeo is Rob Monteg, the boy next door, and now, at the beginning of senior year, Rose Caplet hopes her oldest, best friend may be on his way to becoming her boyfriend. It seems, well, fated--but then her cousin Juliet, daughter of her estranged uncle and aunt, moves back to town and captivates Rob. Serle gives Rose two staunch, beautiful, rich, label-conscious friends, with whom she sits at the top of the high-school food chain. She also gives Rose an antagonist, class outcast Len, who, predictably, becomes more and more attractive as the year progresses and Rob and Juliet play tongue-hockey in public. Readers who try to draw correspondences with the play will find themselves frustrated; is Len Mercutio? Tybalt? They will also find the tawdry truth behind the Caplet-Monteg feud unconvincing. There might have been an interesting story about friendship under here, but it was buried by the high-concept superstructure. Take an archetypal story out of Renaissance Verona and couch it in relentlessly ordinary present-tense prose, and all that's left is banal chick lit. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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May 1, 2012

Gr 8 Up-"Shakespeare got it wrong," or so claims Rosaline in this Malibu-Barbie reworking of Romeo and Juliet. Rosaline's estranged cousin, stunning Juliet Caplet, moves back to upscale San Bellaro, captivating Rose's lifelong pal and just-new boyfriend and revealing scandals at the heart of their families' longstanding feud. In the process, readers meet Rosaline's rather vapid best friends, witness the school misfit's steadfastness, and see firsthand how their soap-opera lives intersect. Using the play's five-act structure (with added epilogue), the author borrows just enough plot details from the Bard's original to allow readers to make connections. However, in her attempt to modernize the classic tragedy, Serle serves up stereotypes often associated with the California lifestyle: parental affairs, drunkenness, casual sex, and vulgar language. When coupled with Rob and Juliet's car plunging over a seaside cliff, readers are left with only TV melodrama and without Shakespeare's brilliant poetry. While the protagonist does change as the story unfolds in Serle's well-paced scenes, the book is too predictable to warrant much fanfare, and libraries would better serve their readers by promoting Lisa Klein's Ophelia (Bloomsbury, 2006) and Caroline B. Cooney's Enter Three Witches (Scholastic, 2007). In this incarnation, it wasn't Shakespeare but Serle who, sadly, "got it wrong."-Nancy Menaldi-Scanlan, The Naples Players, FL

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