I am a sucker for a good modern retelling of a classic tale; I was an impressionable teenager in the era of Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, and the innumerable “what if Shakespeare … but in high school!” movies that were an exercise in diminishing returns.
With, of course, the exception of Ten Things I Hate About You. Sure, the poem that inspires the title is hokey as shit for a girl who’s as pretentious as Kat is, and it is SO VERY teen movie (parties, prom, dating the main character for ulterior motives), but it’s not just the best of its ilk, it does a good job being feminist for the time without completely disregarding the source material.
I think Ten Things May have set me up to expect more out of Tyler’s Taming of the Shrew take, Vinegar Girl. The setting may be modern, but the details hew too close to the original to be believable.
Our Kate’s a college dropout, her younger sister Bunny is still 15 (or can’t date until 15 and I don’t have the book in front of me to check) and it makes the restrictions on her seem so much more reasonable than if she aged her up even 2 years. Kate is biting but loveable, but her devotion to Pyotr, her father’s research assistant she agrees to marry to keep in the US comes out of nowhere. He’s written as likeable enough, but the reader isn’t shown any ties between the two of them, so when the green card becomes a non issue in the last act, it seems that she marries him anyway out of narrative convenience more than anything rational. And that’s not even touching on the wedding reception argument between the sisters and Kate’s out of nowhere speech about it being a hard life for men.
So yeah, I liked the modern setting, and Tyler’s a great writer, but there needed to be more here for Kate’s 180 personality change to make any sense. Interesting take, just needed more.