Quick Pick Book Review: By Any Other Name, by Jodi Picoult

• Opening lines: Melina, May 2013
  Many years after Melina graduated from Bard College, the course she remembered the most was not a playwriting seminar or a theater intensive but an anthropology class. One day, the professor had flashed a slide of a bone with twenty-nine tiny incisions on one long side. "The Lebombo bone was found in a cave in Swaziland in the 1970s and is about forty-four thousand years old," she had said. "It's made of a baboon fibula. For years, it's been the first calendar attributed to man. But I ask you: what man used a twenty-nine day calendar?" The professor seemed to stare directly at Melina. "History", she said, "is written by those in power."
• Reason I picked up the book: I'm a huge Jodi Picoult fan, and I think I've read most if not all of her books—you can read my previous reviews of them here.
• And what's this book about? 
  From the New York Times bestselling co-author of Mad Honey comes a novel about two women, centuries apart—one of whom is the real author of Shakespeare’s plays—who are both forced to hide behind another name.
  
  Young playwright Melina Green has just written a new work inspired by the life of her Elizabethan ancestor Emilia Bassano. But seeing it performed is unlikely, in a theater world where the playing field isn’t level for women. As Melina wonders if she dares risk failure again, her best friend takes the decision out of her hands and submits the play to a festival under a male pseudonym.
  
  In 1581, young Emilia Bassano is a ward of English aristocrats. Her lessons on languages, history, and writing have endowed her with a sharp wit and a gift for storytelling, but like most women of her day, she is allowed no voice of her own. Forced to become a mistress to the Lord Chamberlain, who oversees all theatre productions in England, Emilia sees firsthand how the words of playwrights can move an audience. She begins to form a plan to secretly bring a play of her own to the stage—by paying an actor named William Shakespeare to front her work.
  
  Told in intertwining timelines, By Any Other Name, a sweeping tale of ambition, courage, and desire centers two women who are determined to create something beautiful despite the prejudices they face. Should a writer do whatever it takes to see her story live on ... no matter the cost? This remarkable novel, rooted in primary historical sources, ensures the name Emilia Bassano will no longer be forgotten.
• Recommended for: Anyone who enjoys historical books or books that jump from past to present.
• Favorite paragraph: In public, Emilia played the part of a decorative object. In private, when she felt too full at the seams of her own life, she spilled all that emotion and intelligence and hope onto pages and pages of poetry, fables, and snippets of dialogue. Emilia wrote from the point of view of the bird of prey, delighting in those few moments of freedom befroe the jesses were pulled. She wrote fairy tales about princesses who climbed down brick towers, rescuing themselves. She wrote female characters who were adored for both their minds and their beauty. She wrote witty banter with men who were not afraid of a woman who could think for herself. She wrote of what sex must be like when your soul was as invested as your skin. She wrote love poems, where sometimes love was fire, sometimes it was rote, and sometimes it was agony.
  
  She hid hundreds of pages under her mattress.
  
  She did not write happy endings. As any real poet knows, the best tales are the ones that contain kernel of truth.
  
• Something to know: I vaguely remember hearing that Shakespeare perhaps did not write all of the work that he's known for, and this book explores that.
• What I would have changed: I'll admit that this Picoult book took me a little longer to get in to—however, once the story/plot picks up, I enjoyed it a lot. So I would maybe change the beginning a bit, but I'm not entirely sure how. 
• Overall rating: 4 stars out of 5.
• Where can I find this book? Click here to pre-order via my Amazon affiliate link—the book will be out on August 20, 2024.