Kathryn Barker

Representation: Minor Asian character
Trigger warnings: Death of a person and suicide attempt mentioned, physical injury, blood depiction, coma
Score: Six points out of ten.
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Oh, look, a Romeo and Juliet retelling. I picked this one up after seeing the intriguing title but I didn't know what to expect from it. Waking Romeo is a time travelling story set in the future whilst interweaving two classics: Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights. Unfortunately, when I picked it up, read and finished Waking Romeo, it was such a disappointment. I don't want to reread this novel. Also, why do I keep misreading it as Walking Romeo?

It starts with the first character I see, Juliet, living in London in 2083. Here's the catch: In an optimistic version of 2023, people invented time travel but only forward and so many people wanted to see what would happen in the future, the world fell apart. If the author thinks we would think of that in 2023, she was so wrong. Alas, there is no time travel yet in 2024, which I think is for the better. Only a select few, Deadenders, have the technology to also go back in time. One of them is Ellis. Jules already formed a relationship with Romeo, but, unfortunately for him, he is in a coma. Ellis tasks Jules with waking Romeo with both backwards and forwards time travel, then they briefly travel to 2056 to form a plan. Waking Romeo's most prominent flaws lie in its characters and plot as they were hard to connect with. The plotline was bizarre; one of the most I've seen. Did I mention Waking Romeo is non-linear and jumps around the place? Jules wakes Romeo (much to my dismay Romeo immediately wants to marry Jules. I get that Romeo and Jules already have a relationship, but that comes off as too soon.) Ellis meets Emily Bronte in the 1800s, concluding the narrative.

To summarise, Waking Romeo was a fractured fairy tale about Romeo and Juliet which showed much promise but in the end, it underwhelmed me.… (más)

Actual rating - 3.5 stars

I'll probably re-read it at some point, but overall I have mixed feelings about it.

It's haunting and beautiful.
Exploration of human psychology with otherworldly twist thrown in.
It also pulled at me but - which is horrendously important - only when Alice was talking in a sort of diary form.
Confusing? Not for you alone. Let me elaborate.

The World - Points for the nightmare dreamscape as a parallel alternative reality. It strangely echoes some of my thoughts on these matters. In short - fascinating.

The Characters - Interesting?
Ivan is my favourite, in all honesty.
I did not particularly care for either Alice or Lux.
Lux has my sympathies for being immortal. And the heavy load. Ouch. Poor guy.
Alice is ... difficult for me to place. There is no dislike, just ... disconnect? I liked her thinking voice. Rather interesting head to live in, for a while at least.
Other characters are there, but did not make any particular impression on me? I mean they exist but don't really register?

Overall, an interesting concept and non-preachy exploration of humanity.
This book is for select audience, I think.
Unfortunately, I have not connected to the story as much as I expected to.

FINAL VERDICT: Give it a try? Just keep in mind it has two POVs and is not, strictly, a contemporary. As one reviewer put it: "a more genre-defying, drums-along-to-it’s-own-beat kind of book"… (más)

"(We're) squatting in a world that was built in the past, and peaked there. Died there, even. And yet here we are playing house, pretending there's a pulse."

In this post-apocalyptic wasteland created by selfish humans, Romeo and Juliet's romance is a matter of life and death, not just for them, but for the whole world.

Nearly everyone time-traveled to the future hoping for a better life, but they didn't think about the fact that the future they dreamed of would be built on the ashes of the society they left to crumble. With no one left to fix things, the future kept getting bleaker and bleaker, and the travelers kept jumping further and further, hoping for a better tomorrow.

Romeo and Juliet live in a tiny community of non-travelers, and their ill-fated romance occurred before the start of the book. But this Romeo and Juliette haven't died - at least, not yet. Now Juliette's permanently disabled, and Romeo has been in a coma for two years.

Their paths cross with a small group of time-travelers called the Deadenders, people snatched from the brink of death to try to fix the timeline. They've been sent with one mission: wake up Romeo. But the threads of time keep getting more and more tangled, and their task is harder than they can possibly imagine.

The world the author has built is breathtakingly bleak and brutal, littered with crumbling buildings, malfunctioned time travel pods and the bones of unlucky time travelers. The survivors try to keep a sense of normalcy, but their world shrinks day by day and their food supplies from the past won't last forever.

This book is action-packed and tightly paced, but this is not a book to skim. It takes careful attention to keep all the timelines and time-traveling jumps straight in your head.

Juliette's a heroine to root for as she comes into her own and learns to be resilient in the face of the dangers thrust upon her. She finds a guide in Elliot, a member of the Deadenders about her age, and together, they set out to wake Romeo and set into motion all the events to come.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advance review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.… (más)