Waking Romeo
by Kathryn Barker
Flatiron Books, 2022

The time travel in Kathryn Baker’s new novel Waking Romeo doesn’t solve any problems; it was developed a few decades into the 21st century and was initially a popular fad, with Travelers using their sleek little time-traveling pods in order to hop a few years or a few decades forward in time (the pods only travel forward in time, never backward). In short order, so many people have fled to the future that the present falls apart. 

Young Juliet (“Jules”) lives in that world, the messed-up daughter of one of the last important families:

We were one of the original founding families – the ones who created the Settlement, all those generations back. We convinced others to reject the pods and their grass-is-greener promise. To stay put, to live in the now, not for the future. To just say no to time travel. Before I was born, the name Capulet was as good as royalty, they tell me. Then, in my generation, it became synonymous with the feud – Capulets versus Montagues. And, more lately? The family with the broken daughter.

Jules has written the story of her romance with Romeo as a kind of pastiche on Shakespeare, and the now-standard obnoxious corset forced on contemporary fiction, making all female characters omnipotent badasses and all male characters feckless ninnies, does hardly any violence in this case, since that's more or less how Shakespeare wrote it. To this familiar story, Barker adds several twists: Romeo isn’t dead but comatose, and Jules makes contact with a group of characters from the far future, “Deadenders” who are tasked with safeguarding the timeline from all that irresponsible pod-hopping (they and they alone have the technology to travel backward in time as well as forward). 

Those Deadenders, all caught up in “this wretched business of time,” are Iggy, Beth, Henry, and the book’s other main character, Ellis, “four miscreant teens who briefly tried to save the world,” and even though they live walled off from a wasteland full of wild beasts and the piling-up corpses of end-of-the-line time travellers, they still have time for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion – it might be the end of time and the edge of the apocalypse, but members of one-hundredth of one percent of the population are still dutifully represented in the book’s action.

That action is fairly engaging; Waking Romeo is very page-turning YA fiction, even though it shares with most YA what appears to be a requisite for the whole genre, namely large chunks of ghastly prose, as in the opening scene where Jules is listening angrily to phony-baloney Rosaline give a eulogy for poor absent Romeo:

“It's been two years,” she says softly, then gives a dramatic pause. It hasn't been two years, you self-aggrandizing cow. It's been one year, eleven months, and thirty days. If it had been two years, I would have have played hooky, because Rosaline always pulls this assembly love-fest rubbish on significant milestones. The girl really does live for such stuff. I don't know how she managed to spin it the way she did, but serious props for a job well done. Nobody remembers the pesky little detail about how she dumped him and broke his heart. Hell no. In the retelling, she was his one great love and I was just the little skank who killed him. Well, mostly killed him, if you're getting all technical.

Drecky prose like this is endemic in YA and has one obvious purpose: to make young readers want to have Jules as a friend. It’s witheringly condescending, but it’s also a sine qua non of the genre, it seems, along with a) parental figures being either evil, absent, or gelded, and b) the fate of entire worlds hanging on the dating life of the female protagonist – in this case hanging on not only the relationship Jules has with poor comatose Romeo but also with brooding Ellis, who was, back in the past, the inspiration for the brooding hero of Wuthering Heights (the literary references would be a good deal more reassuring if Barker ever seemed to understand the originals, but it’s not a good sign when she has Jules describe Romeo & Juliet as “all about noble swordfights and declarations of undying love”).

Waking Romeo can’t quite overcome its many flaw; apart from a few quirks of vocabulary and shoehorned diversity, all its characters are essentially the same, the small amount of actual action is vaguely described, the worldbuilding is nonexistent (you have to work extra hard to avoid logic flaws in a time travel story, and Barker doesn’t work at all), the villains are completely unconvincing, and the emotional connections between characters feel entirely stage-directed. There’s undeniable narrative energy here, but you can get that and much more in Shakespeare’s play, if you’re getting all technical.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.