What’s in a name, Shake­speare? I’ll tell you: Everything.

Ros­aline knows that she and Rob are des­tined to be together. Rose has been wait­ing for years for Rob to kiss her—and when he finally does, it’s per­fect. But then Juliet moves back to town. Juliet, who used to be Rose’s best friend. Juliet, who now inex­plic­a­bly hates her. Juliet, who is gor­geous, vin­dic­tive, and a lit­tle bit crazy…and who has set her sights on Rob. He doesn’t even stand a chance. Rose is dev­as­tated over los­ing Rob to Juliet. This is not how the story was sup­posed to go. And when rumors start swirling about Juliet’s insta­bil­ity, her need­i­ness, and her threats of sui­cide, Rose starts to fear not only for Rob’s heart, but also for his life. Because Shake­speare may have got­ten the story wrong, but we all still know how it ends….

When I first heard about this book I was quite intrigued with the idea of telling the story of Romeo and Juliet from Rosaline’s point of view. The girl before the girl. So I was a lit­tle dis­ap­pointed when I started read­ing and realised that this was actu­ally a con­tem­po­rary novel, based on the famous play.

For one thing, the lit­tle we know of the orig­i­nal Ros­aline was that she rejected Romeo (I’ve always doubted she was the first girl Romeo had pro­claimed his undy­ing love to) and Romeo laments her rejec­tion. He isn’t too happy about the fact that she’s taken a vow of chastity either.

Poor boy.

Serle’s Ros­aline is in love with Romeo, or Rob, in this case, and when he finally asks her out, she believes it is the begin­ning of an epic love. Of course, as we all know, Rob’s atten­tions aren’t des­tined to last long and soon enough, poor Ros­aline is deal­ing with a bro­ken heart and a few painful home truths.

If I’m hon­est by page 109 I was seri­ously con­sid­er­ing aban­don­ing this. The main char­ac­ters were silly, shal­low and pre­ten­tious and the first half of the book is incred­i­bly tedious, con­sist­ing of Rosaline’s (rather self-deprecating) mono­logue about her typ­i­cal high school day, how gen­er­ally supe­rior her and her friends are, how much of a ‘dis­ease’ a boy called Len is, how unfair life is and either day­dream­ing about Rob or over-analysing every thing he says. How­ever, the book def­i­nitely improves dur­ing Act Three and I will admit to quite enjoy­ing the sec­ond half of the story. The main rea­son for this is because of the grow­ing romance between Ros­aline and Len, result­ing in some far more inter­est­ing scenes than we ever see between her and her sup­posed ‘true love’.

The orig­i­nal Romeo and Juliet were fool­ish and naive, but ulti­mately, endear­ing. Choos­ing to depict the story in this way, with Ros­aline heart­bro­ken over Rob, Serle fun­da­men­tally alters the char­ac­ters as we know them. Rob is an alto­gether less sym­pa­thetic hero, in fact, he’s a jerk, who treats his life-long friend in the worst pos­si­ble way. By default, Juliet becomes a ‘boyfriend stealer’, a ‘slut’, and later on, a hys­ter­i­cal, poten­tially sui­ci­dal, slut at that. This just wasn’t a mes­sage I was com­fort­able with. I detest slut sham­ing, both in fic­tion and real life, and while I wouldn’t say it is overly empha­sised in the book, it is there and I don’t feel the author took the time to prop­erly explore the issue, other than Rosaline’s half-hearted attempt to befriend Juliet near the end. Why is Juliet blamed for every­thing? Why does no one take issue with the fact that Rob becomes more and more unsta­ble and screams at her in very threat­en­ing way in pub­lic? Why are there rumors that she is sui­ci­dal? Why does every­one blame her for their deaths?

Another prob­lem with this inter­pre­ta­tion of the char­ac­ters, is that when tragedy strikes, it has far less impact of the reader than it per­haps should have done. Rob’s char­ac­ter is never fully devel­oped beyond his (appalling) treat­ment of Ros­aline and Juliet, and Juliet’s death almost feels like a foot­note. We get some glimpses into the Rob Ros­aline knew and loved as she grieves, and there were some quite strong scenes that brought home the pain of loos­ing such a close friend so sud­denly, and I only wish these had been expanded on.

There were sev­eral things I quite liked about this book. I grew to like the friend­ship between the three main girls, the sup­port and gen­uine love they show each other, even if I didn’t much like the char­ac­ters them­selves. I liked Serle’s mes­sage about choice. I really liked the hints of romance between Len and Ros­aline. But so much more was mediocre. In the end, When You Were Mine is a bit hit and miss and takes too long time to get into its stride. A light teenage romance that dis­ap­point­ingly, for an older reader, brushes over some of the darker, more com­plex plot lines the story presented.