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Summary: Mary-Sue at Elsinore: someone drown her, please!
Comment: I'm interested in the way that classic stories can be reworked for modern audiences, and in fanfiction as a phenomenon. However, if this appeared on a fanfiction forum, it would be pounced upon immediately as a preposterous piece of 'Mary-Sue'-dom, and the author would be suspected of being a 14-year-old with a crush on whoever is the current hot young actor playing Hamlet. As satire, it might work, but unfortunately, I suspect it is meant to be taken at face-value.
Fiedler's Ophelia is a classic Mary-Sue, with entirely anachronistic values and attitudes to gender, class & c. Even her paternity is changed in a silly plot-twist. In draining the story of any real tragedy (no sympathetic characters are allowed to remain dead, so there is no real grief or pain), this novel drains it equally of meaning. It's a Young Adult version of the wilfully anachronistic 'bodice-ripping' romance novels that, I suppose, its readers will be expected to move on to when they're old enough to handle greater sexual content. But an older/more emotionally mature teenaged reader, who feels ready to cope with more explicit love-scenes, would perhaps do better to meet the teenaged Queen Gertrude in the first part of Updike's 'Gertrude and Claudius', a spirited girl for whom the limitations of her time and social status are *real* obstacles to happiness.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Dating Hamlet gives kids a start for Shakespeare
Comment: I've read this book quite a few times, and I liked it very much. It encourages the younger reader to open to Shakespeare's plays, and I think Lisa Fiedler has done it very well.
Great job, Mrs. Fiedler!!! You rock!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Hamlet - but with less deaths and a happy ending!
Comment: Dating Hamlet is a great read and it's the kind of book you can read again and again. I first read this book when I was 10 and now I'm nearly 13 and I have read it again I really understand and appreciate the book. The story is very good because even though I loved the Shakespeare play,and this book gives more depth into the characters and Ophelia is portayed as a much stronger person than she is in the play. It is a very moving book in some parts, like at the funeral of Ophelia.
I like the way Lisa Fielder has wrote it, by using the proper language and writing with Ophelia's thoughts and emotions.
I would recommend this 'Dating Hamlet' highly as it is such an excellent book you can read over and over again and still get new things from it. I hope Fielder writes a sequel!
It may be predicable, but what's wrong with a happy ending?
Customer Rating:
Summary: An interesting turn of events
Comment: I normally put down any book that I realise is written in first person, with a few exceptions. It takes a certain amount of skill to write in the first person and sound like a character, a character I am willing to deal with for an entire book.
Ophelia's voice in "Dating Hamlet" was at once engaging and easy to follow, inspite of a pretty good attempt to mirror Shakespearan english. (Mind you it isn't perfect and the characters do not, except when being a bit silly, speak in verse). The book is the author's effort to give the power back to the female characters that she had encountered in the classics, Ophelia is one of the most unempowered women in Shakespeare's whole opus. To empower her took alot of back plot that was not in the original work.
With few exceptions it works really well, in my opinion. One example being when Hamlet is making his first mad speech to himself in the court and looks up (a gesture I remember) he is actually speaking to Ophelia who has hidden herself up in the gallery of the throne room. As I was reading this I was imagining how this could be staged in tandem with the play, how a director might alter Ophelia and Hamlet's actions to allow the audience to know, that Ophelia was in on the plot. (I am inclined to this anyways, having in yesteryear written a paper taking that side, just for the outrageousness of the idea)
Mind you, a few moments are a bit too contrived, but it wasn't so painful as the rest of the book was very enjoyable, and remarkably realistic. The ending is probably the most contrived bit about the whole work, but I am not going to argue with it, in fact I wouldn't mind reading her other book about Juliet.
It was also amusing to see that the crux of this book rested on a frequent plot device of Shakespeare, one that is utilized in Hamlet. That being the play with in the play. We have here, the traditional play used to catch Claudius, and Hamlet's play acting at being mad but also--Ophelia, Laertes, the Gravedigger, Horatio and Ophelia's lady in waiting, Anne, in on the plot. A whole new cast of inner play players.
The book is an easy read, I picked it up on my dinner break and finished it before going to bed. Enjoyable, probably more so for anyone who is rather more than less familiar with "Hamlet."
Customer Rating:
Summary: Depressed about Hamlet's Tragedy? How 'bout try a Happy one?
Comment: Well, i wouldn't say that this was the best novel i have ever read, but i wouldn't say it was bad. True enough, there are several points that are not at all corrisponding to Shakespeare's Hamlet, but it was over all amusing, if you want a Hamlet with a happy ending where everything goes alright and they live happily ever after, well here's your choice! it was an interesting read through and through, even though the idea is not exactly original because it was based on Shakespear's work, i'd say it is a original as it CAN be. Ophelia is a character who did not have enough influence to Hamlet in shakespear's play, now? and i agree with the author's idea about the fact that if Ophelia was a bit stronger, then she might have actually prevented this tragedy from happening, and she therefore created this version of Hamlet which is not only works but flows fairly well despiet the changes to the Original Hamlet. I think that over all this novel was fairly interesting, i wouldn't call it 100 out of 100 points, but i think, for an teenage novel targeted for young adults i think this is an overall good read, worth your time. i especially liked the ending where the author cleverly brings in Romeo and Juliet, i'm actually hoping there might be a "Dating Romeo" in one of her next works.
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