Retellings of classics are a very popular genre among historical fiction novels. I was so thrilled to find a book that narrates the Romeo and Juliet story from the nurse's point of view. This story begins with Angelica her husband Pietro who are peasants living in fourteenth century and Verona.
Although they are poor, they love each other dearly and have a wonderful life raising six boys until the plague claims the lives of all of their children. They think they will never have the chance to bear other children until one night when Angelica experiences sudden abdominal pains and she is surprised to discover that she is in labor. After days of grueling labor Angelica gives birth to a baby girl, whom she is told is stillborn.
One thing I will warn the reader about is that Romeo himself does not make an appearance until the end of the book. Most of the story deals with Juliet's life as a child and how Angelica becomes her nurse. Pietro, in order to give Angelica some physical and emotional comfort after her baby girl dies, finds her a job as a wet nurse for an upper class family who had a daughter born on the same day as Angelica's. The entire first part of JULIET'S NURSE describes the first three years of Juliet's life, and develops the strong bond that nurse and child share.
I thought that the diction and word choice in JULIET'S NURSE was unusual. The book is written in modern, not Shakespearean, English but the author inserts some Shakespearean language randomly into the text anyway. It found it very distracting to read phrases like "by my troth" or words like "perchance." The last third of the novel, when the traditional story of Romeo and Juliet emerges, is particularly full of such Shakespearean language.
JULIET'S NURSE contains a lot of details about life in fourteenth century Italy. Lois Loveen describes the Cappelletti palace, the clothes of the upper class and the rich banquets that lords use to entertain. We are also given a glimpse of what it would have looked like to walk around the city of Verona and visit its markets places and worship in its basilica.
JULIET'S NURSE did help me to better imagine the setting of Shakespeare's Verona. If you desire another, very different perspective of the Romeo and Juliet story, then JULIET'S NURSE is definitely worth giving a try.
An enthralling new telling of Shakespeareβs Romeo and
Julietβtold from the perspective of Julietβs nurse.
In Verona, a city ravaged by plague and political
rivalries,
a mother mourning the death of her day-old infant enters
the
household of the powerful Cappelletti family to become the
wet-nurse to their newborn baby. As she serves her beloved
Juliet over the next fourteen years, the nurse learns the
Cappellettisβ darkest secrets. Those secretsβand the
nurseβs
deep personal griefβerupt across five momentous days of
love
and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family.
By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Julietβs Nurse gives
voice to one of literatureβs most memorable and
distinctive
characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider
among
Veronaβs wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and
intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies,
and
losses only hinted at in Shakespeareβs play, this is a
never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Veronaβthe
love between a grieving woman and the precious child of
her
heart.
In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory, and
Geraldine Brooks, Julietβs Nurse is a rich prequel that
reimagines the worldβs most cherished tale of love and
loss,
suffering and survival.
No excerpt available.
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