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Romeo and/or Juliet

Romeo and/or Juliet by Ryan North is a choose-your-own-adventure retelling of the Shakespearean classic. It’s all sorts of fun with adorable artwork in shades of white, red, pink, and gray. However, the novelty of the CYOA format wears off quickly and Juliet’s routes were much more fun than Romeo’s (not that I mind too terribly).

A little disclaimer that this isn’t a book for kids. Teens, maybe. But the humor is bawdy and some of the adventures can be a bit more adult. Readers can choose to go a more traditional route with the retelling of Romeo & Juliet, or they can really go for broke and pick the most outlandish events.

At the start, you can choose whether you want to “play” as Romeo or Juliet. Juliet was by far my favorite. She’s a tomboy at heart and spends her days “getting buff.” Romeo was less compelling and didn’t seem to have as fun of a twist to his characterization. Pretty much he seemed to be in love with love.

The artwork of the book is the best aspect. With multiple artists contributing, there isn’t one uniform art style, just a consistent color scheme. Some illustrations are more cartoonish, while others are detailed. There’s also a full list of all the artists in the back of the book, which I appreciated, since I tend to follow a lot of artists on Twitter and Instagram.

Since I primarily played as Juliet, I’ll share some of my favorite endings.

Show Spoiler

There are the more conventional ones where she gets married and has kids. But there are more exciting endings where she becomes a pirate embracing her single life, a maniacal serial killer, or on in which she meets a dude who appreciates her love of fitness and getting swole.

It’d make a great gift for someone or a funny read-aloud at parties, but I don’t recommend trying to read through all the endings in one sitting, as I became rather tired of flipping pages around. And don’t bother with Romeo.

– Amanda

Romeo loves Juliet. Or Rosaline. And Juliet loves Romeo. Or Viola. Or Orlando. It’s Shakespeare as you’ve never played him before.

In this choose-your-own-path version of Romeo and Juliet, you choose where the story goes every time you read! What if Romeo never met Juliet? What if Juliet got really buff instead of moping around the castle all day? What if they teamed up to take over Verona with robot suits? Whatever your adventure, you’re guaranteed to find lots of romance, lots of epic fight scenes, and plenty of questionable decision-making by very emotional teens.

All of the endings—there are over a hundred—feature beautiful illustrations by some of the greatest artists working today, including New York Times bestsellers Kate Beaton, Noelle Stevenson, Randall Munroe, and Jon Klassen.

Packed with exciting choices, fun puzzles, secret surprises, terrible puns, and more than a billion possible storylines, Romeo and/or Juliet offers a new experience every time you read it. You can choose to play as Romeo or Juliet (obviously) but you can also play as both of them, or as Juliet’s nurse, or, if you’re good, you can even unlock a fourth playable character! That’s right. We figured out how to have unlockable characters in books.