The Best Advice by Amy Dressler (Shakespeare Project, Book 2)
Publication Date: July 8, 2025
After reading a second book of hers, I'm going to go ahead and say that I'm a fan of Amy Dressler and I look forward to reading more of her books, particularly this Shakespeare retelling series! Her first book, How to Align the Stars, retells my favorite Shakespeare comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Best Advice follows up with a retelling of my second favorite Shakespeare comedy, As You Like It.
In both books, Dressler deftly transplants the scenarios and characters of the respective plays to the contemporary Pacific Northwest. However, unlike the most creatively imagined setting for a performance of the original script, Dressler makes the bones her own, sculpting and weaving them into lived-in and relevant characters and settings in a novel for a modern audience, with playful references to the original text (e.g., Phoebe Shepherd-Shepherd) and (mostly) ironing out relationships and gender portrayals that are problematic to today's readers.
In The Best Advice, Dressler keeps all the crucial elements of the play alive: the advice-giving, the poems, and the gender roleplay, using apt modern analogs such as viral advice columns, social media, and LGBT characters whose genuine and celebrated existence supersedes the gender cosplay of the original play. I also loved that there were literal poems on trees! To go even further, I might have liked to see a genderqueer Roz, but hiding behind a different gender identity online gets the job done while giving #reallife problems.
I'd highly recommend Dressler's novels to fellow Shakespeare fans, but also, honestly, just for people looking for a fun and elevated literary romance with deep character growth and a happy ending. The Best Advice happens to be just like what many of us are craving these days. 😉
Received for review via LibraryThing; all opinions are my own.
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