Pub. Date: September 1st, 2013
Publisher: Lerner Publishing Group/ Carolrhoda Lab
320 pages
Hardcover
With sweeping lyricism and expertly woven beauty amongst its
tragedy, as a modern retelling from Ophelia’s perspective, A Wounded Name more than does justice to Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
Since her mother’s death, Ophelia has been considered mildly
crazy. With the ability to see ghosts and hear the music of the bean sidhe,
even the pills that her father all but forces down her throat, can’t make Ophelia
‘normal’. When Elsinore Academy’s Headmaster dies, everyone is shaken, but no
one so much as his son, Dane Hamlet. Dane - devastated by the loss, and furious
with the rest of his family - begins to possessively depend and lean on
Ophelia. Left with meeting Dane’s needs, her father’s standards, and keeping a
promise to her dead mother, Ophelia becomes impervious to her own needs, and suffers
greatly for it. When Hamlet starts to act more and more deranged, no one is
safe from his wrath, especially not Ophelia.
Though A Wounded Name
modernizes Hamlet’s world, the play’s original flow and lyricism is expertly
maintained. If a reader were unfamiliar with the play, the creatively
interwoven original passages would seem like Hutchison’s words, but for those
who know, they are little treats dropped in every once in a while. I was
personally not a big fan of Hamlet being reduced from Prince, to son of a
school Headmaster, but the majority of the other modernizations worked very well,
and I believe they made the story much more accessible and relatable for
readers.
