ronit & jamil had been on my tbr for a few years and i had such high hopes for this book, but i felt that this just fell so flat. i love novels in verse, and i love shakespearean retellings (especially in modern-day political contexts), but this book did not deliver.

i feel like there were so many times were this felt like a middle-grade novel with the false-deep metaphors and simplistic poetical techniques. however, this book handles topics of sex in a manner only appropriate for  young adult fiction. i feel like the book could not decide its target audience, leading to the verse being weak and taking away from the novel’s main messages. it was overly repetitive, with whole chapters being the same but from the other characters POV, which was almost identical. 

additionally, *spolier alert* neither ronit nor jamil die in this, which always irritates me when romeo & juliet is retold. new characters were just introduced without infomation to aid ronit & jamil’s relationship and fix their problem of forbidden love by helping them escape… and then the book ended. i understand the message portrayed with this book’s ambiguous ending, but it definitely could have been executed better as it felt very deus ex machina. i was very confused by the jump from ronit & jamil’s POVs to their dads’ POVs for one act.

i think this book would have done much better without being a (loose?) retelling of romeo and juliet.

i feel like the idea of star-crossed young lovers is always laid over the framework of romeo & juliet, when the main structural elements of the play are not added. not every element of an original source text needs to be added to a retelling, but the idea of star-crossed lovers shouldn’t be the only part of romeo & juliet that it is retold with.

so many people read romeo & juliet as a love story, when in reality it’s a tragedy whose messages about fate, revenge, petty love, violence and family run so much deeper than many view it to be.

i think ronit & jamil didn’t explore the original text’s themes as it appeared to aspire to, such as the relationship between passion and violence, as well as familial bonds, but again, i feel like they were faintly touched upon but not properly explored.

it was nice to read a young adult book on the israel-palestine conflict, and it’s definitely encouraged me to read more non-fiction on the history of this conflict.