I did not know I needed a Romeo and Juliet meets The Time Traveler’s Wife mash-up, but here we are and I am obsessed. I first heard about The Hundred Loves of Juliet and ended up getting an ARC while at Emerald City Comic Con in March, when Evelyn Skye made an appearance. She sold me on this story so fast and I’m so glad I picked it up.
The Hundred Loves of Juliet [Buy Bookshop Amazon] boils down to this: What if Shakespeare got Romeo and Juliet wrong and instead of dying, Romeo is cursed to an exceedingly long life where he finds Juliet over and over again, but meeting and falling in love dooms her to death soon after. Intense, right? That’s what you get from this story.
For most of this story, we are with modern day Juliet, Helene, and Romeo’s current identity, Sebastien. Sebastien saw Helene 10 years ago on July 10th (a very important date for the Shakespeare play), but wanted to spare her, so he moved to Alaska. Welp, now she’s fleeing from a terrible marriage and decides to move to Alaska to write her novel…. and promptly runs into Sebastien. She intrinsically knows who he is because he’s the imaginary friend she’s fallen in love with throughout her life. It’s quite jarring and their run in doesn’t go so well.
I can’t say much more than that about what happens because it can get too spoilery too fast, and I try to avoid blowing the story for you whenever possible.
Evelyn crushes it with the writing of this story. I’ve never really understood when people describe writing as ‘lush’ until this book. This feels lush. The descriptions and prose are just freaking fantastic. The way she blends the historical portions with the current timeline (and keeps everything straight!) is so well done. Bonus: I thought I knew how this story would play out, but the third act flipped some things upside down. It was a much more intense ending than I imagined, in a good way.
This novel becomes even more special when you hear what inspired it and the real way Evelyn was able to pull genuine grief into the story.
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Literary HypeWoman 