Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
-The Tempest 1.2

I once read somewhere that no man is an island. But I think maybe girls are.

It's been a few months since I've read a Shakespeare retelling, hasn't it? Well this week, I was studying The Tempest for class (not for the first time), was craving a horror read, and figured maybe it was time for me to pick up this sapphic Tempest-inspired story with Yellowjackets vibes.

Now, I was expecting more of a direct retelling, which this story wasn't. It's not so much that it's reimagining The Tempest but holding a conversation with it. Certain elements feel superimposed upon each other, but don't follow direct parallels in regards to the narrative or characters.

In this book, we follow Violet Whitlock: a "volatile" child in foster care who struggles with school and relationships, feral and sharp in all the places little girls should be tame and obedient. So Violet borrows the name and academic resume of her golden child twin sister to apply for a summer contest with the Shakespeare Center, with one lucky winner getting to accompany a group of teen celebrities to the filming of a new movie adaptation of (you guessed it, reader,) The Tempest. But when their slimy male director decides to take them on a whaling journey instead of a direct plane flight to the set, the ship finds itself in the middle of a (there's literally no other way I can word this, you must understand) tempest and ends up washing the girls and their director ashore on a remote island off the Pacific Coast. But the island isn't everything it seems and the girls find themselves metamorphosing in their fight for survival.

As a horror novel alone, this book was compelling and exciting and unbelievably nauseating. The body horror alone had me swallowing down bile on the tube. I'm sure many people in public wondered why I looked so green. In contrast to the dizzying gore, this book had incredibly lush and stunning atmosphere and descriptors. The island was haunting and unnerving, sure, but like Caliban's speech about his own island, was enchanting and alluring and abundant in its beauty. It was dream-like, yet viscerally easy to picture. This is a book that calls for a gorgeous adaptation or at least some beautiful fanart. (If I have time amidst grad school life, I'll try, I promise.)

But the best part of this book is its allegorical applications. See, this story is about trauma. It's about the claws and armor that young girls have to build in order to keep themselves safe from prying eyes and roaming hands. And it would've been enough to make the survival efforts of the shipwreck girls a parallel for the perpetual state of survival they embody in the real world. But McCauley takes a step further through the more speculative elements of this story to hold questions about trauma and healing, leaning into the ways that the scars can change people inside and out.

I did leave the book craving just a few more Tempest parallels, especially since the application of Shakespeare onto the text was quite heavy-handed. (Not only was the play constantly quoted, but generally, the girls seemed to be named entirely after Shakespeare characters. Which I thought would perhaps lean into a commentary about the way female characters in Shakespeare are treated, a la Enter The Body, but one of them wasn't even named after a female character, and the traits or experiences of said characters had no relation to McCauley's, so it seemed more of a surface-level choice for a wink and a nudge.) There was also a brief line towards the end that does work to parallel some of the book's plot to The Tempest. I had mixed feelings about this, as in some ways, I think it would have been more advantageous to leave that interpretation up to the reader. Especially since this reading of the play called Sycorax the "villain" and implied that the girls were Prospero, which unsettled me considering a lot of the contemporary discussions involving race and land interpretations of the original text. I forgive McCauley because not everyone is neck-deep in Shakespeare scholarship every day like I am, but I just wish it had been open for those parallels to be assigned by the readership in personally impactful ways, especially with the connections to the play being as loose as they were. BUT. That being said, the relationship of the land to the girls, the conversations about bodily autonomy, and the themes of freedom and survival provided this story with plenty of comparative elements to the original play, all of which I thought were utilized beautifully.

Overall, just a really good YA horror with allegory, atmosphere, sapphics, and Shakespeare.

CW: body horror, blood & gore, violence, drowning, injury detail, adult/minor relationship, grooming, emesis, death, suicide, animal death, character death