This Must Be Love **

Sutherland, Tui T. This Must Be Love. New York: Harper Collins, 2004.

I can tell you one thing that was NOT love-- my feelings for this book. Yuck. It took me 2 weeks to read it. I could only read 20-25 pages at a time. This novel is based upon A Midsummer Night's Dream by Shakespeare. The main female characters are Helena and Hermia. The story pretty much follows the plot of Midsummer, only in modern times. To add something interesting to the story, the play within the play is the school production of Romeo & Juliet. It is an all male cast, just like in Shakespeare's time. Hermia and Helena are involved with the production as is their male love interests.

This book is told in various ways. It is told in emails, notes to each other, and diary entries. While I usually enjoy books like this, particularly books where the reader gets multiple persepectives, I didn't enjoy this one. The characters were really quite annoying. Hermia would sign her notes to Helena with things like "cartwheels, pinwheels, waterwheels, Hermia". Huh? There wans't anything in the entire note about wheels, water, or anything. It was just annoying.

I would recommend this to anyone that likes Shakespeare, since they might enjoy the parallels between this books and the play upon which it is based. Anyone who likes sappy boosk with overly dramatic characters might also enjoy this one. But, most readers won't like it at all.