Waking Romeo
Reviewed By Ian Banks May 25, 2021
Author Kathryn Barker
Distributor: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781760297152
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Release Date: March 2021
Website: https://www.allenandunwin.com
Waking Romeo is a very, very clever take on several of the Classics beloved of generations, woven into a fast paced time travel novel destined to appeal to Fantasy readers regardless of age.
Set in the time between Worlds, when the world has ended or almost ended in a cataclysmic event, Juliet is a member of one of the families that chose to remain in the ‘here’, deciding that what they knew was better than a future of what they did not! Survival is that of the fittest and most resourceful, and life is not great, in fact it is anything but great, is it terrible, traumatic and tragic.
And as if things could get any worse, the love of Juliet’s life, Romeo is in a coma and as she is pregnant to him, her family have been rather terse, refusing to have anything further to do with her. Life is far from good.
Enter a handsome stranger Heathcliff Ellis, a man from another time on an important mission; to wake Romeo from his coma but as it turns out, as in all seriously good romances, things do not go as planned.
Waking Romeo is a wonderfully rich and varied tale of love, true love and hope, and so many things couched beautifully in the richness of language, which Kathryn Barker has created with the unlimited help of Emily Bronte’s classic Wuthering Heights, a dark, brooding tale of passion and despair, the fractured tale of Romeo and Juliet from William Shakespeare and the magic of time travel.
Told in the first person, Waking Romeo is set to become a classic modern day read, wrapped in the literature of a time long gone, before time travel was truly considered, women knew their place and men did their own thing. Nothing at all like the world of Jules, where she is a very definite woman, Ellis is intriguing and Romeo is just, well Romeo!
Get set to enjoy a fantastically enjoyable modern day romance in the fast lane of forward time travel and all that is there to be discovered.