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New Books Network Interview: Christina Dodd

Against a mustard yellow background, a pattern of flowers, skulls, snakes, a tomb, a sword, and a vial hints at the main elements of Christina Dodd's A Daughter of Fair Verona

Cozy historical mysteries—even cozy historical mysteries featuring fictional characters—lie pretty thick on the ground. Jane Austen, Josephine Tey, Agatha Christie, and their characters, to name just a few examples, have all been successfully conscripted into the role of sleuths.


A lot of these books are great fun to read, but I can’t remember one that was as flat-out hilarious (in the most satisfying way) as Christina Dodd’s heroine Rosie, the fictional daughter of the equally fictional Romeo and Juliet. As Christina mentions in our New Books Network interview, which went live last week, her agent “had to pick herself up off the floor,” she was laughing so hard when she finished it. And I had the same reaction.


So read on, listen to the interview, then do yourself a favor and buy the book, A Daughter of Fair Verona (Daughter of Montague 1). You’ll be as delighted as I am that Daughter of Montague 2 is already in production, due out next June. (I was hoping I’d have the chance to edit the manuscript for Kensington Books, but alas, someone else got there first. So I’ll have to wait in line like everyone else.)


From a stone balcony attached to a brick house and assigned to Juliet, the heroine of Shakespeare's tragedy, a dark-haired modern woman in spectacles gazes at the photographer

As usual, the rest of this post comes from New Books in Historical Fiction.

It takes a certain gall to update one of William Shakespeare’s most enduring and most beloved tragedies. Anyone who has survived an English literature class at a US high school or college knows that neither Romeo nor Juliet lives to old age; and those few who have not read the play, for pleasure or under duress, have probably seen one of the screen versions.

All the more kudos, then, to Christina Dodd for pulling off this updated and re-imagined sequel to that classic play. This first book in a new series called Daughter of Montague features Rosaline, nicknamed Rosie—the eldest daughter of Verona’s most famous and still passionate couple. Rosie has at best a jaundiced eye toward love and marriage, having spent her entire life observing life on an emotional seesaw. Yet this is fifteenth-century Europe, and “wife” is the only acceptable destiny for a woman. When her famous parents finally make a match for her, Rosie’s fate appears to be sealed. Then things go wrong in ways even Rosie could not have anticipated.

The story is fun, the mystery satisfying, the author’s obvious delight in manipulating Shakespeare’s famous tale infectious, but what really grabs the reader is Rosie’s voice. At once irreverent and responsible, she sounds more like a modern teenager than anyone from the fifteenth century, but that’s exactly why she draws us into her world.


Image: Photograph of Juliet’s balcony in Verona by Iain Cameron, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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