Book Review: By Any Other Name by Jodi Picoult
Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centres two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on . . . no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.
My Thoughts:This week, I’ve been making my way through this new release by Jodi Picoult, By Any Other Name. It’s quite a massive read, and the chapters were beyond long, over 100 pages for most of the historical ones. It was hard to get through, so to lighten the load, I did a hybrid read of ebook and audio, which definitely made a difference in terms of reading progress.
I used to love Jodi Picoult’s books, but the last half dozen have not given me the same reading rush as her earlier ones. This one was quite the departure for her, a dual timeline historical, the connecting thread being two women playwrights whose voices are shouting into the void of a male dominated profession.
Overall, the premise was interesting, the underpinning themes of the story topical, the structure of the story clever, the research underpinning it immense, but ultimately, the execution was dull. It’s a very long and very boring book. This seems like a passion project for Jodi Picoult that may have best been served as a historical non-fiction biography.
As much as it pains me to bid farewell to a former favourite author, I can’t see myself picking up any more Picoult novels in the future. The author notes at the end, all twenty pages of it were more interesting than the 500 plus pages of the story that preceded it. I think this story would have worked better with less of the historical content and a more fully fleshed out contemporary story. And shorter chapters.
