Blue Wolf Reviews

Tag: shakespeare

  • Waking Romeo

    Waking Romeo

    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.

  • Death By Shakespeare Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts

    Death By Shakespeare Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts

    Shakespeare’s work has infiltrated our language; lines from his thirty nine plays and 154 poems and sonnets have become popular sayings.  As with Coronavirus of this century, large numbers of people were dying from the plague in Shakespeare’s time resulting in all sorts of public gatherings, including theatres being banned.

    Disease didn’t just shape his profession it was a very intimate part of his life. In order to compete with the violent entertainment on offer to Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences, a struggling playwright needed to include death when theatres were open, thus Shakespeare utilized a multitude of methods to kill off his characters.

    In her comprehensive, extensively research book “Death by Shakespeare: Snakebites, Stabbings and Broken Hearts” chemist and author, Kathryn Harkup investigates not only the science behind these deaths, but also many other aspects of Elizabethan/Jacobean life.

    Covering each manner of death from a scientific perspective the author addresses a multitude of 16th and 17th century methods of extinguishing someone’s life: hanging, poisoning, burning at the stake, beheadings, sword fights, etc. This thoroughly entertaining book is filled with intrigue and information; it is also packed with morbid curiosities.

    To further engage the reader the author has used a variety of quotes and character examples from the Bard’s plays.  As Shakespeare’s plays are full of characters dying both off and on stage, the author has provided an appendix at the end of the book, which summarizes each death occurring in his plays and poems.

    Although parts of her book are morbid and gruesome, as Ms Harper analyses the gory details of death, her book is highly readable and it provides a clear, captivating scientific analysis of all forms of human demise.  This is not only a fascinating book for Shakespeare devotees but also for true crime and fictional crime readers whom will also find this a captivating read.

  • A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs

    A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs

    As any lover of dogs will know, there is far, far more to their canine companions than they ever let you know, after all they need to have a few secrets as they set out to make sure their beloved humans get what life is about from a dog’s perspective.

    In this wonderful collection of trivia, compiled by Peter J Conradi, many of the other lives of dogs and humans is revealed, making this the perfect book to dip into during stressful times, such as we are currently experiencing.

    Who would have though Shakespeare really, really disliked dogs: it seems he did, while the American humourist Ogden Nash penned a collection titled ‘A Introduction to Dogs’ which contains the very telling lines, ‘ A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of.’: oh so very true.

    The Titanic is well known as perhaps the greatest maritime tragedy in modern history. Less is known about the twelve dogs who were also on board this fateful ship, all beloved of their owners and kept in kennels on F Deck. All perished as did their owners; all but one, Rigel, a Newfoundland who swam in front of one lonely lifeboat and barked to prevent the rescue ship Carpathia, running over the top of it in the dark icy waters. This folkloric tale has never been verified.

    Bluey, officially the world’s oldest dog lived to be almost 30 years old, and Byron wrote and Epitaph to a Dog in honour of his Newfoundland, Boatswain who died of rabies in 1808. Byron buried him in fitting style with a tomb larger, as it turned out, than his.

    Underdogs receive a mention along with their interesting history and of course there is Toto made famous in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and beloved of children and adults alike.

    So much amazing, informative and intriguing history has been gathered in the pages of A Dictionary of Interesting and Important Dogs which will help while away the hours, as once again reading allows us to discover so many wonderful things from the comfort of our favourite armchairs.

    Enjoy some levity as you discover so many things you never, ever knew about dogs.