Juliet, Immortal - Stacey Jay

When I took the previous few books back the library, I was on a mission.  I was leaving for Florida the next day and I needed enough books to last me the drive there and back along with 7 days pure vacation. This sounds like a ridiculous amount of thought or caring to put into such a task but obviously, I am serious about my reading.  I wanted books for the 24-hour drive that would pull me in so deep I wouldn't be able to stop reading and the hours would fly by. It can be so, so satisfying to be able to just read a whole book through uninterrupted and I didn't want to end up with crap books that I would regret taking up room in the small bag I was taking.  


Unfortunately, a lot of the books I had in mind when I went in to the library that day were unavailable. To some extent, I had to wing it.  However, there was one book I had had on hold - it had been released the day before as I hadn't had time yet to come in.  I decided to start there and went up to the teen section to find it, thinking it would be perfect for the drive down.


Teen books have come a long, long way since I first started reading teen books.  I'm jealous of kids these days who now have ever-increasing square footage devoted to them in bookstores.  It used to be one pitiful row of shelves.  Many of the girls I used to work with loved teen books and we'd of course talk about them while we were working.  Juliet, Immortal I came across on my own while reshelving some books and the cover caught me (I'm starting to really see that that's a theme with me).  It's just gorgeous.  The jacket sounded promising, and I made a mental note to read it at some point.  


So, many months later, I'm in a car with my boyfriend and two friends of ours, trucking down the I-75 and I'm reading this book.  It has a really interesting premise that is a little foggy in some ways - essentially Romeo and Juliet existed, their original story closely follows the one we are familiar with except for a crucial detail: at the final moment, Romeo betrayed Juliet.  He murdered her in exchange for an eternal existence, flitting in and out through time.  What he didn't count on was that Juliet would be saved before her last spark of life could go out (by her Nurse) and would be offered a chance at a similar existence.  Think of Romeo working for the powers of evil and Juliet working for the powers of good, and them having to fight against each other for several hundred years.  This concept is part of the book that is very interesting, but could be much stronger. 


That is all setup for the main part of the story, which takes place in our present time with Romeo and Juliet occupying the bodies of teens in the same town and each working with a very different motive.


All in all, it definitely kept my attention, mainly because of the whole idea of Romeo and Juliet being immortal.  The best part, or most effective part, might have been the role of Romeo cast as an evil character. Still for all it's great bits and pieces, I would have loved to see this story fleshed out more, standing on a stronger foundation. It would have made a fantastic and possibly classic adult book, written in the right way.  It seems like there are a lot of teen books that are like this, and I'm not sure if that reflects publishers' greed or a general ambivalence toward the quality of what teens get to read or a little of both. Probably both with a leaning towards the former. 


Side note: for some reason I didn't even think to bring a book light, and was mostly finished when it got too dark to read. I was lucky that my friends had some mini flashlights in the car (partly because we're theatre technicians and it's the kind of thing you just have around, partly because they as a rule tend to be over-prepared).