Romeo's Ex Rosaline

Relationships of the Past  

           Everyone has at least heard of the classic tragedy of Romeo and Juliet written by William Shakespeare. If you haven't, the story of Romeo and Juliet takes place in Verona, Italy where there is a ongoing fighting between the Montague and Capulet families. The young and handsome Romeo of the Montague family falls in love with the beautiful Juliet of the Capulet family and ends up secretly getting married. Knowing that neither family will accept the marriage,Juliet came up with a plan in which she would pretend to be dead with a potion  and then run away with Romeo when she awakes. 
           Now here's the reason why this is a classic; because of the late timing of Juliet's servant Friar Laurence getting the plan for escape to Romeo in time, Romeo hearing the news of Juliet being dead ran to her grave taking poison with him. He gave her on last kiss and drank the poison. When Juliet wakes up from the potion, upon seeing Romeo's dead body, she takes her own life. Epic ending isn't it? Now the story Romeo's Ex Rosaline by Lisa Fiedler tells the same exact story but from Rosaline's point of view and the reader gets to see what  happened to Rosaline when Romeo and Juliet fell in love and how she played a role in this story. 
           The main character, Rosaline, of the book Romeo's Ex Rosaline, has many strong relationships with characters such as Juliet (Rosaline's younger cousin) and Benvolio (Romeo's close Montague friend). Juliet being Rosaline's younger cousin, Rosaline relationship with her was that of a protector because Rosaline loved Juliet like a little sister. For example when Juliet told Rosaline that she was in love with Romeo and Romeo was in love with her only after spending two hours with him, Rosaline was skeptical about the their affection for each other. Rosaline had her reasons to be skeptical. For one thing, she couldn't accept the fact that Romeo truly loved Juliet because just a few days back Romeo was mourning about his unconditional love for Rosaline and after spending merely two hours with Juliet he had fallen in love again? Impossible. Rosaline believed that Romeo's words were hollow and unfounded and no good for her little Juliet. Although being the loving cousin she is, in the end she believed in her cousins love for Romeo and helped plan the escape which unfortunately ended up with the two lovers being dead. The death of Juliet made Rosaline a miserable soul and hated herself for letting any of this happen. 
           Romeo and Juliet weren't the only love story that occurred in the book. For Benvolio, seeing Rosaline was love at first sight where as Rosaline grew to love him as time went on.  Rosaline had started to fall in love with Benvolio when all this Romeo and Juliet drama was unfolding but what held back her love for Benvolio was that she promised and vowed to never marry and to stay chaste (virgin)  for the rest of her life and accomplishing that goal is hard when your in love with someone. So after the death of Juliet, Rosaline goes off to study medicine like she planned to do from the beginning. Which shows the amount of determination Rosaline has for the thing she had her mind set on. After her studies she came back to her home town where Benvolio remained unmarried. They end up getting married and live happily ever after. 
               This book was a very fun and interesting book I read over the summer. It was interesting because the relationships in this book were very deep and more complex to resemble real people. the relationships were more mature and developed. It wasn't just a person liking or disliking another person, it was more than that which made this book so fun to read. I didn't want the book to end, I wanted to see how the relationship between the feuding families families changed. All in all this was a great book I read in the summer.