Miranda has Shakespeare in her blood: she hopes one day to become a Shakespearean actor like her famous parents. At least, she does until her disastrous performance in her school’s staging of The Taming of the Shrew. Humiliated, Miranda skips the opening-night party. All she wants to do is hide.
Fellow cast member, Stephen Langford, has other plans for Miranda. When he steps out of the backstage shadows and asks if she’d like to meet Shakespeare, Miranda thinks he’s a total nutcase. But before she can object, Stephen whisks her back to 16th century England—the world Stephen’s really from. He wants Miranda to use her acting talents and modern-day charms on the young Will Shakespeare. Without her help, Stephen claims, the world will lose its greatest playwright.
Miranda isn’t convinced she’s the girl for the job. Why would Shakespeare care about her? And just who is this infuriating time traveler, Stephen Langford? Reluctantly, she agrees to help, knowing that it’s her only chance of getting back to the present and her “real” life. What Miranda doesn’t bargain for is finding true love . . . with no acting required.
Release Date: August 14, 2012
Let’s face it, there is evidence of how much I love and appreciate Shakespeare based on the title and design of my review blog. So when I read the synopsis for Kissing Shakespeare, I kept thinking that this was going to be as awesome as Shakespeare in Love (although I admit that no one can beat Tom Stoppard’s brilliant writing). Maybe I went in with my expectations too high.
Mingle did an excellent job setting her stage for sixteenth century England, and I have to say that the depictions of Hoghton Tower, the clothing, the dancing, meals…basically everything in that sense was very well written and realistic. For the most part I think that the conversations set in the sixteenth century felt very authentic based on the vocabulary and sentence structure.
As much as I respect Mingle for tackling such a rich historical time for a story, I feel that there are some significant gaps in the timeline, the plot, and even the love story.
For the entirety of the story, Miranda is only back in time for about a month, but after all the intense things that happen over the course of that month, it felt like MONTHS went by rather than just one. Overall, the plot seemed rushed. With the current knowledge of Shakespeare, even during what is considered the “lost years,” the idea that he could have served as a school master is plausible. However, the idea that Shakespeare was caught up in the religious turmoil in Elizabethan England doesn’t seem as realistic. That being said, I think that Mingle’s obvious knowledge of the Catholic/Protestant/Puritan problems really helped the story.
That being said, there still were a lot of things in the plot that were easily predictable and there wasn’t necessarily a surprise factor at all in the love story. While I liked Miranda’s character, I think that her family issues (especially with her mother) were somewhat moot in comparison to the rest of the story. I do think that it provided some depth of character, but there really wasn’t much in the way of resolution since 95% of the novel was in the 1500s instead of modern day.
Overall, while I enjoyed Kissing Shakespeare, it just didn’t live up to my expectations and I even struggled to finish it. It seems very average…3 Bards.
Moving! 