TheseBooksAren'tMine's Reviews > Teach the Torches to Burn

Thank you to NetGalley and Feiwel & Friends for the eArc of Teach the Torches to Burn: A Romeo & Juliet Remix. All opinions are my own.

I have been an English teacher for 20 years, and probably about 17 of those have taught Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet at least twice a year for all those years. One of my stupid human tricks is that you can read nearly any line from R&J to me and I can tell you the act and the scene that it comes from. So obviously I know this play inside and out.

Nervous as I was to read this book, I was utterly delighted by this queer remix of R&J. Caleb Roehrig took all the best qualities of the characters and instead of making them their fatal flaws, turned them into something that made them acutely likable and terribly human. Even though Romeo and Juliet, Tybalt and Benvolio, Friar Laurence and Lords and Ladies Capulet/Montague all appear in this book, they do not necessarily play similar roles. While Tybalt is still the unlikable aggressor, Juliet is independent and actually gets to express her own thoughts, Friar Laurence, though still the "responsible adult" Romeo most trusts, actually gives good advice, and Benvolio is footloose and fancy free, much more a Mercutio than Mercutio actually is. And of course there's the original character Valentine, Mercutio's brother, who catches Romeo's attention one night in—where else?—an orchard, of course. And our star-crossed lovers' journey goes from there.

Roehrig clearly knows the play well; he took many of the familiar trappings of the setting and conflict and tipped them just slightly, shook them up just enough that the core elements of the play remained while slotting both new and old characters into different roles. Seeing a queer love story play out while in the presence of some of my favorite Shakespeare characters was satisfying in a way I didn't think I needed.

I can picture my students making a beeline for this novel after we finish reading Romeo and Juliet, especially the students who generally lack representation in 400-year-old pieces of literature.