By Any Other Name Book Review

By Any Other Name

By: Jodi Picoult

Publish Date: August 20, 2024

Publisher:

Random House Publishing Group-Ballantine/Ballantine Books

General fiction (adult)/Historical fiction/women’s fiction

#ByAnyOtherName#NetGalley

I would like to thank both NetGalley and Ballentine Books for allowing me to read and review this book. Sorry it took me a year to get to it. All opinions are my own.

Book Review:

Oh, I wish that I could give this book a higher rating than a 3 stars. I love Jodi’s writing style and most of the things that she writes. This book just wasn’t doing it for me. Maybe because it was about Shakespeare and his plays. I really only enjoyed a couple of his plays and the rest I just thought were ok.

This book is a dual timeline historical fiction. It is in England during the 1600’s and the USA in the 2000’s.

In New York city there is a young woman who is trying to make it as a playwright and is having trouble because she is a female, and they just aren’t being hired, or their work isn’t chosen for a play.

In England a young girl is being trained for an Earl as his companion. She loves to write and read which is not normal for that time period.

What do the two have in common, well they are related.

Melina Green has written a play about her many times removed Grandmother, Emilia Bassano. She has gone through some major research on her and wants to give her acknowledgement for what she has done. Melina’s play is picked up because her friend entered it in a contest but didn’t use her full name. He entered it with shortening her name to Mel. She begs him to claim the play as his own and she is his assistant. He really wants her to confuse that the play is her work, but she can’t bring herself to do so, and that makes him made. To make things worse her friend is black and gay, and the industry has been doing the same thing to them.

Emilia doesn’t have a great life because she is the companion to an Earl and then finds herself pregnant and now has to get married to a man she doesn’t like. The Earl has paid for this marriage because he himself is already married and that means he has to stop the relationship between them, but he wants to take care of her. What he doesn’t realize is that the man isn’t nice. She has suffered a lot but always falls to her writing to get away from her world. She is able to sell some of her writings to men playwrights with an agreement of a small fee.

You will have to read the book to find out what happens to both of them.

There have been some suggestions that Shakespeare was one of the men she sold her work to. To this day the debate is still going on.

I do love Jodi’s writing and will continue to read her work, but this book just wasn’t one for me.