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cto10121 · 9 months

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Waking Romeo (2022)—Review Part 2

[Part 1] In which Jules and Ellis bond over mutual trauma while getting followed by a mysterious threat, Jules comes to the most basic of revelations, Shakespeare gets mangled, soap opera-level twists, and the Romeo Hate Dumb train trudges serenely on. Spoilers, of course.

“Why?” he asks again.

“It was love,” I say automatically.

Ellis steps away, running his hands through his hair.

“You wish to be reunited with a boy who would let you do that to yourself?" he says, getting worked up.

“Starting was such sweet sorrow. I mean parting. I mean—”

“That is not what love is,” says Ellis, surprisingly forceful. “That is the opposite of that. It is about protecting this.” He puts his hand firmly over my scar, over my heart. (159)

Romeo let Juliet commit suicide.

Romeo let her.

ROMEO LET—

Okay, put aside the obvious fact that this astounding bit of clownery is not true, not even in this twisted AU. Barker’s Romeo overdosed while getting high and Jules thought he had died. So not even Romeo the Death Eater compelled/persuaded Jules to give her life for him. Let’s put all that aside.

Have not women their own fucking agency??!!! Jules made her own decision to shuffle off this mortal coil. She was acting out of unresolved grief for her dead cousin, which she later realized, and Romeo’s seeming death only just compounded it. So Barker’s warning against girls giving up everything for their boyfriends not only falls flat but is contradicted by the narrative itself.

My eyes are hot, verging on tears. I've cried plenty since what happened. I’ve shed rivers of tears over my husband though they were mostly the civilized kind, like Rosaline musters. Romeo got my pretty tears. But the ugly ones, the ones what make me keen and shake and let out strange noises? They belong in the dark, to my secret, and they can't come out now.

Something has to come out now, though—I can't keep it all down. So in the reflection with me, I imagine Romeo. Only this time I see him as he really was. A world away from the fourteenth-century honor and frills of my story.

“Did my heart love till now? Forswear it, sight, for I ne'er saw true beauty…” he whispers in my ear as he kisses my neck, as his hands run the length of my body. But, of course, that’s not quite the line he delivered that night in my bedroom. His language was mostly grunts and moans. The precious few words he used were…less poetic.

“Juliet Capulet tried to kill herself over a boy that she barely even knew,” I say to my reflection. (161)

Shocker.

So. A lot of bullshit to sort out here. 1) I don’t believe for one single second that Jules never ugly cried over Romeo. Not when she saw his dead body? Not when she saw him in a coma? Homegirl was really just 🥺 all along over a traumatic overdose and death attempt?

And 2) Barker’s penchant for recontextualizing lines from OG Romeo’s soliloquies/monologues as pick-up lines said directly to Juliet is truly pissing me off, especially since elsewhere Barker has shown extensive knowledge of Shakespeare, even the more obscure lines.

[Ellis POV] “I am in every word of it. I am in the people and the places and even in the weather. It is full of little jokes and references that only I would understand," I add, without humor. “She even used my Christian name for her character, and my surname as the pseudonym that she published the book under it is all in reference to me. Everything comes back to me. She was—”

I break off, unsure how to finish. I have never spoken of Emily to anyone. Frogs knew. In the first year when I pined for her so keenly, Frogs matter-of-factly announced that she had written a book. Afterward, he found me a copy and taught me to read it. Though we never discussed her. (166)

And then there’s the Wuthering Heights hate dumb. Emily Brontë was apparently such a bigot meanie that after Ellis disappeared from her life she wrote a whole-ass book about him as a sexy if monstrous Byronic anti-hero/antagonist and one-half of a dark star-crossed lover pair as a coping mechanism. And because of this Ellis is perfect for the similarly-wronged Jules.

“What I'm saying is…I don't actually believe that what I wrote is true.” Jules sounds surprised as she speaks, as though she has just worked that part out for herself. “I don’t think that the version of Romeo in these pages is the real boy or that it's what his character is actually like, deep down. The story is simply...an alternative version of events to help me move past the real ones. Maybe it was the same for her. Maybe your girl wrote that story, not because it was true, but because it wasn’t.” (167)

You seemed to be convinced yourself of it before, Jules. Hell, she barely even thought of Tybalt, the supposedly real catalyst for events, just Romeo and her love affair and then Ellis. I’m beginning to think the whole Tybalt’s-death-as-the-real-catalyst-for-Jules is a late retcon on Barker’s part when she realized it didn’t make a lick of sense.

“May I read it?” I nod at the notebook.

“No, it's silly,” says Jules, without missing a beat. “I wrote it in the style of Shakespeare, so the language is tricky. Besides—it’s not finished. I’m having trouble with the ending.” (167)

Again, I have to question the fact that Emily is framed critically for writing a whole-ass book about Ellis while our protagonist is framed favorably for writing a whole-ass book about Romeo. Maybe Romeo should go on a similar time travel adventure after he discovers Jules’ false portrayal of him in Waking Romeo and meets a secondary love interest who actually appreciates him and calls out her weird sexist double standard.

[Ellis POV] And then I think of her words from before: “What if he had gotten my note?” And I cannot help but speculate...what are the chances that the note in question was not the one that Frogs sent me to retrieve from her family crypt all those years go? The one with the two entwined hearts on the front, which smelled of perfume? The odds are not good, I would wager. (168)

So Jules sent a message to Romeo which did not get to him because Ellis had taken it first as part of his time travel missions. This leaves Ellis as directly responsible for R&J’s tragic ending…or at least he would be had not the author retconned this later and had her douchebag Romeo say he did read it and laughed at it. Yeah, that happened.

[Jules POV] “I thought you knew,” she says softly, “that I visit him after you leave.”

I feel sick. “How long? How long have you been coming?”

She smiles sadly.

“Always.”

Rosaline has always come? I think back to all those cheesy tribute assemblies and the rivers of fake tears. Were they real after all? Was it all real? Does she genuinely love him?

“We were together for years before you entered the picture,” Rosaline reminds me. “I care about him too.” (215)

Oh, no, no, you’re not getting away with this, Barker!!!

So Rosaline’s “pretty tears” and clichéd speeches for Romeo turn out actually genuine, one of the most blatant retcons of this piece. I have a feeling halfway through Barker read her editors’ notes, realized the backlash against the Not Like Other Girls trope, and did some hasty backtracking.

And of course, there’s the 483727733th iteration of ‘Rosaline and Romeo were actually a thing after all.’ Kill this with fire.

“I am glad you got your…what was it that you called him? Your pretty piece?” I say, repeating her words from before, perhaps somewhat unkindly.

“Pretty…to imply not manly.” Jules shakes her head. “Yes, I used to do that all the time, even in my head—describe ‘feminine’ traits in men as somehow a weakness. I didn’t do it consciously: But even in my writing, the bias was there.”

Is this a rebuke of herself and of Emily? Wuthering Heights is known for subverting gender stereotypes, yet also for portraying femininity…less favorably. (221)

The author accidentally included her notes in the book, I see. These editors are getting more incompetent by the day.

So as part of the whole “whoops, I just realized my earlier Not Like Other Girls shit is now unpopular” thing (a working theory), our author is now bravely trying to convince us she was making a point about internalized misogyny. Except that OG Juliet does not describe Romeo with femininized imagery. Probably the closest is the little bird metaphor…but even then that just reads as kinky.

[Jules POV] And I was wrong—love isn't everything.

I decide that, if I ever write another play, it won't be a love story. It will be about action—taking action versus not taking action. Because standing on my balcony, looking out at the in-tatters world? It's becoming clear that we have to act. That we have to do it today, or tomorrow won't happen.

With that, my thoughts return to Shakespeare. His plays used to be performed at a theater called “the Globe.” I figured it was just a cool name—I never really thought about the metaphor of it. The idea that all the drama was literally playing out on the world's stage. That each story, however small, was part of a bigger picture. (225)

*sings in Aspects of Love* Love / Love isn’t everything

Yes, because that was what was wrong with the OG Juliet—her just standing in her balcony babbling about love when she should have been out there girlbossing an end to the feud!!! What do you mean, she’s a 13-year-old in a patriarchal society that raised her to be meek and obedient and subservient to men? That’s no excuse for being such a basic bitch!!!!

Also. OG R&J are many things. But passive ain’t one of them. Romeo approaches Juliet, Juliet flirts back, he climbs high-ass garden walls, she tells him to arrange for their marriage and sends her Nurse to him, Juliet comes to the church to get married, they marry, Romeo tries to intervene in the fight, he fights and kills Tybalt, Juliet meets with the Friar and drinks the coma potion, Romeo flies to Mantua, buys poison, and returns when he hears Juliet is dead, kills Paris and then himself, and Juliet wakes up and kills herself. What part of all of that reads passive to you?????

[Jules POV] And then I'm thinking about how it all played out. How everything happened because my cousin had died the week before. Tybalt was dead, so I went to that goddamn party. My heart was all bleeding and raw. I needed something to numb the pain, and there he was—Romeo. I used the attention of a boy as my drug and distraction.

Tybalt's death was the tragedy that sparked all disaster to follow. Without him dying, I would never have been at that party, would never have fallen for Romeo. My story would have been different. Everyone's story would have been different. So why the hell did Tybalt have to die? (243)

Before this moment, Jules has only spoken about Tybalt like maybe TWICE in the whole goddamn book. I read this book from cover to cover and I cannot tell you anything about who Tybalt was, his personality, nor his relationship to Juliet—only that he died. We get absolutely no insight or even inkling into Jules’ past relationship with him beyond one or two vague anecdotes. So yes, I count this whole psychological explanation as a retcon, and a badly done one too.

Anyway, with Ellis’ help Jules finally manages to wake Romeo with the drug, but as a cop-out she leaves before he fully awakens. When she does meet him at his parents’ house, Jules drops this bombshell on him:

“That night when we were together in my room…” I say, my voice trailing off. How pathetic am I that I can't even say it? I didn't even put it in my story—I merely alluded to it as “the love-performing night,” of all the childish cop-outs.

There’s a long, drawn-out silence.

“I got pregnant,” I finally say. “I didn’t know it when I went to the crypt that night. When…” I leave that part unsaid. “The nurses didn’t realize until after the third operation. By that point, they'd already pumped me full of every kind of drug to keep me breathing.” I try to keep my voice clinical. “They said it was a miracle the baby wasn't gone already, but that if it survived, it would be ... different.” At the mention of “different,” Romeo's eyes automatically travel to my arm—the numb one. I try to ignore it.

“Mum, Dad, and Aunt Miranda kept it a secret. I basically stayed in my room for a whole year. People thought I was grieving,” I continue. “Or they thought my parents had locked me up because I was out of control.” (260)

Jules had a secret baby even though by all accounts she should have miscarried it from both her suicide attempt and the drugs they used to save her. We are officially in soap opera territory.

#romeo and juliet #cristina reads #waking romeo #kathryn barker #romeo hate dumb

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