Read more
Informationen zum Autor Joy McCullough Klappentext "At once tender, poetic and ferocious, Enter The Body breathes new life into the Bard’s most tragic heroines. More than a tribute to Shakespeare, this kaleidoscopic, ambitious novel-in-verse gives Juliet, Ophelia, Cordelia, and Lavinia the chance to tell their own stories full of passion, justice, sisterhood, and love. Simply spectacular."—Michael L. Printz Award winner Laura Ruby, author of Bone Gap In the room beneath a stage's trapdoor, Shakespeare’s dead teenage girls compare their experiences and retell the stories of their lives, their loves, and their fates in their own words. Bestselling author Joy McCullough offers a brilliant testament to how young women can support each other and reclaim their stories in the aftermath of trauma. Leseprobe [Trap Room] (The trap room beneath all the stages, anywhere. The ghost light is perpetually on, but it illuminates very little. Which makes it easier to keep to oneself. That woman with blood on her hands, for example, always wanders into the same corner, every time she crashes through that great stage of fools to this space beneath. Muttering to herself, but never to anyone else. The one in the nightgown with strangle marks around her neck—-clutching a handkerchief like it’ll save her from these men, these men—-she usually heads to a corner too, after the fall. But only because she doesn’t know what else to do. It’s a room, but there are infinite corners. Enough for everyone to avoid the zealot in singed armor who reeks of the fire that burned her. Or the wild--eyed queen who looks as though she died a dozen deaths before she drank the poison that brought her here. The sisters who killed one another definitely need their own corners. They crash through, again and again, these women, while the boards above their heads creak with the trodding of the ones who live, or die in glory. It gets to be monotonous. But now comes a girl the others aren’t accustomed to. It’s not that she hasn’t been down here before. In fact, she arrived before the rest of them, a violent splotch of ink from the quill of the Bard so young he hadn’t yet mastered his instrument. She is the first draft to his later masterpieces; without her they don’t exist. And yet they can be forgiven for not remembering her; the moment they see her, they do their level bests to shove her from their minds. You would too. Only I won’t let you. The jolt this first--draft girl receives when her body crumples to the ground is the least of her concerns. Those concerns are pretty evenly tied between the blood that gushes from her mouth, and also from the end of each arm, where hands should be. But hands are not. She doesn’t even bother uncrumpling. What would be the point? But there’s one woman under this stage compelled to help her, one who has known violence herself and is young enough to remember, while old enough to imagine herself maternal, even if she never survives to bear a child. This maternal one—-in a flimsy nightgown that is by design transparent when stage lights hit it exactly right—-approaches the bloody heap. She strokes the girl’s hair, soothes the frightened creature until she looks up. The woman startles; for a moment she’s not certain whether this girl is prey or predator. Perhaps she is covered in someone else’s blood? She is—-but not at her choosing. And her lack of hands offers irrefutable evidence that the girl herself has been on the receiving end of some significant evil. ...
