In this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Rory King is a scholarship student at Bosworth Academy. Rory (white) exists on the edges of high school life, knowing she doesn’t fit in at Bosworth. But she’s also a senior; one who’s paid her dues in the theater department and wants her just reward: the leading role in the spring musical. It’s a reward Rory knows won’t be bestowed upon her, so she’s going to take it. Rory’s never had more than a single line in a play, but humility, helpfulness, and assurance that she’s fine (following the suggestion of a previous suicide attempt) are roles she carries out with finesse while enacting an insidious, calculating plan. Like Shakespeare’s Richard in his quest to be king, she’ll let no one get in her way—not her mom, her only friends, the theater teacher who rules the drama department, or the English teacher who’s mentored her. Unthreatening and unassuming on the surface, Rory is brilliant and driven, her relationship to morality and reality ungrounded. Her plan comes to fruition, step by increasingly disturbing step, in a twisty story that sees Rory’s unreliable narration shifts from first to third person—sometimes moving between them—and across various forms, primarily prose but also script and musical score. Increasingly compelling and unsettling, the story also offers Rory’s entertaining, insightful yet skewed perspective on fellow theater kids and other peers, her teachers, and others in this literary novel with mature content and themes.

In a vicious, delicious contemporary novel inspired by Shakespeare's Richard III, the lauded author of The Family Fortuna lifts the curtain on a high school thespian who'll stop at nothing to land the lead.

Rory is an antihero for the ages. Like Shakespeare's Richard III, she confides in her audience, telling us exactly the lengths she'll go to to secure the leading role in Bosworth Academy's senior musical, confessing without shame that she is charming and conniving and brutally ambitious, that we will watch and root for her even as she manipulates and endangers those around her. And we do. Perhaps it's because we don't want to believe that she's as relentless as she claims. Rory is an underdog, after all, a scholarship kid teased for her weight. Surely there will be redemption? Surely our dread and patience will be rewarded? Intricately plotted with an ingenious narrative that blends multiple viewpoints with script excerpts and an original musical score, Lindsay Eagar's whip-smart, precision-crafted, and gleefully compulsive page-turner taps into the dark side of high school theater production. A diabolically good read, it forces our complicity as we wince and cheer for an arresting drama queen who just can't help going full-tilt nasty in the pursuit of her dreams.