Title: Romeo and Juliet
Author: Illustrated by Sonia Leong, Origional script by William Shakespeare
Publisher: Self Made Hero
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 97809552856
Pages: 196
Price: £6.99
Rating: 7
Synopsis:
"My only love sprung from my only hate," laments Juliet, the heroine of "Romeo and Juliet", the world's most famous love story. A fusion of classic Shakespeare with visuals, this is a cutting-edge adaptation that will impassion and grip it's readers. Set in modern-day Japan, two young lovers are caught up in a bitter vendetta between their rival Yakuza Families - the Montagues and the Capulets. Can their forbidden love survive as violence, betreyal and tragedy explode on the streets of Tokyo?
(Yeah, it's a pretty meleodramatic synopsis.)
Review:
Ok, so there I am innocently browesing the interweb for a copy of Hamlet for school when -boom!- a series of manga appeared! I was pretty stunned, when I'm revising English Lit., I tend to draw out the scenes I don't understand in stick comic form, so this was exactly the kind of thing I needed.
I'll start with the positives; straight forward to read- if you like the Western left to right way of doing things, text more or less unchanged from the Shakespeare making it very good to read alongside school studies, quick to read compared to plain text, and several very nice colour pages at the front featuring key quotes and identifing the whole cast.
But I feel it's let down by being set in modern day Toyko, once you move "Romeo and Julliet" out of it's true context and setting, the whole plot starts to fall down. Teenage girls of 13 can't get married and murderers aren't banished- they go to prision. Romeo wasn't a "rock idol".
At the end of the day however, this book cleared up so many of my misunderstandings surrounding "Romeo and Julliet" that I can't really knock it too much. Now I've just got to get through "Hamlet"!
