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. ( )

"(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. ( )

A very interesting re-working of the Romeo and Juliet story. Juliet (Jules) Capulet is a 15 year old in the future who 2 years ago had a torrid fling with a boy from the enemy's family Romeo that resulted in both of them trying to kill themselves. Jules has survived with a large scar and an arm that doesn't work but Romeo is still in a coma. The world where they both live has collapsed as people have been using pods to travel further and further into the future to try and find a better life. Juliet lives in a Settlement of people who refuse to use the Pods because you can only go forward in time, you can never go back. They survive by eating tinned stockpiled food as there is no electricity, no sewerage and no internet to connect them to others. Its a horrible world in that at any moment a pod could appear from the past and if it materializes where something else now stands (like a tree) the pod merges molecularly with the tree and the occupants are instantly killed.

At the end of the world ( where the pods can travel no further) lives Ellis (Heathcliff) and a band of people who have been rescued the instant before their deaths by an AI called Frogs. Frogs sends the motley crew on missions back and forward in time and they are known as the Deadenders. On one such mission, Eliis is told to "Wake Romeo" otherwise the future world will all change. So Ellis joins forces with Juliet in their united quest to wake Romeo. But Juliet is hiding a secret and Ellis is pining for the love he left behind. Together they must also avoid the man dressed like a WW2 soldier who seems determined to kill them for some reason.

Very interesting, different dystopian that I think the author had an absolute ball writing because there are so many Shakespearean references thrown in -and not just from R& J but also from Macbeth , Hamlet and the sonnets. The language just flows and made me smile so many times with the "in joke" references to the Bard's works profusely scattered throughout the work. The story itself with its multiple time jumps works well all the way through to the last Act which starts to get really confusing. (I couldn't understand how Ellis could exist as and adult and a teenager in the same time.)

Recommended for older readers. ( )