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 Shakespeare’s Romeo and
Juliet—told from the perspective of Juliet’s 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
Cappellettis’ darkest secrets. Those secrets—and the
nurse’s
deep personal grief—erupt across five momentous days of
love
and loss that destroy a daughter, and a family.
By turns sensual, tragic, and comic, Juliet’s Nurse gives
voice to one of literature’s most memorable and
distinctive
characters, a woman who was both insider and outsider
among
Verona’s wealthy ruling class. Exploring the romance and
intrigue of interwoven loyalties, rivalries, jealousies,
and
losses only hinted at in Shakespeare’s play, this is a
never-before-heard tale of the deepest love in Verona—the
love between a grieving woman and the precious child of
her
heart.
In the tradition of Sarah Dunant, Philippa Gregory, and
Geraldine Brooks, Juliet’s Nurse is a rich prequel that
reimagines the world’s most cherished tale of love and
loss,
suffering and survival.
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