By Alexene Farol Follmuth

“Viola Reyes is annoyed. Her painstakingly crafted tabletop game campaign was shot down, her best friend is suggesting she try being more “likable,” and school running back Jack Orsino is the most lackadaisical Student Body President she’s ever seen, which makes her job as VP that much harder. Vi’s favorite escape from the world is the MMORPG Twelfth Knight, but online spaces aren’t exactly kind to girls like her―girls who are extremely competent and have the swagger to prove it. So Vi creates a masculine alter ego, choosing to play as a knight named Cesario to create a safe haven for herself. But when a football injury leads Jack Orsino to the world of Twelfth Knight, Vi is alarmed to discover their online alter egos―Cesario and Duke Orsino―are surprisingly well-matched. As the long nights of game-play turn into discussions about life and love, Vi and Jack soon realise they’ve become more than just weapon-wielding characters in an online game. But Vi has been concealing her true identity from Jack, and Jack might just be falling for her offline…” (Goodreads).

It has been a looong time since I’ve posted a review! Unfortunately, finals week really took me out, as did the weeks leading up to it. April was not a great month for me when it comes to free time, but now I’m home for the summer and ready to keep my (likely very few) readers updated! In other news, I started an Instagram for this site. I’ll probably post more info separately soon.

Twelfth Knight was one of the few books I was able to get through last month, probably because it took me almost two weeks to finish. This fandom-driven high school rom-com had a slow start (mainly because of how annoying the characters are), but the redemption arcs and cute romance redeemed it slightly.

I’m giving the plot a high rating because it’s supposed to be a retelling of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (so it’s not really the author’s plot to be criticized). There also wasn’t a lot to criticize plot wise in the first place. I thought the pacing was very consistent and picked up nicely at the end. For a retelling, the story was very original and fun. I loved the lore from the various fandoms Viola is a part of, and the nostalgia got me thinking of my Harry Potter and KOTLC obsession days. Classic Hallmark miscommunications can sometimes be annoying and overused, but Follmuth left no plot holes and kept the conflicts entertainingly frustrating.

While I enjoyed the dual POV style, I hated Viola so much that I dreaded reading her chapters. The dual POV did add to the dramatic irony and rom-com vibe though. I also enjoyed Follmuths writing style. It was so much different from Atlas Six, but the lighter and more immature vibe worked much better for this type of book.

The characters were some of the worst characters I’ve dealt with in a long time. It wasn’t that they were badly written or inconsistent – they were just really bad people. Viola had a severe victim complex, and while in some situations she was not treated right, she usually either blew it out of proportion or did not take the obvious path to solving the issue. For example, in the very beginning, Viola experiences bad attitudes and inappropriate sexist comments from her TTRPG group. My first question was why did she become friends with these people in the first place? I understand not having many people to play D&D with, but there’s plenty of other ways to find nicer D&D players in your area, especially for a go-getter like Viola. The way a lot of male characters acted was very unrealistic, too. I know I don’t speak for all women, but in my experiences and from what I’ve heard from others, “nerdy” (in a good way) fandoms usually have very welcoming and inclusive atmospheres. I often see people trying to claim that science fiction TV show or book fandoms exclude women but I’ve never experienced that or actually seen proof of others experiencing it. Video games are another story, of course, but I felt like all of these situations could’ve been taken care of without the victim attitude Viola took on. In a situation where someone was being as blatantly sexist as some of the men in this book were being, there are other ways to handle things than by playing into the “I’m a strong woman with a lot of anger inside… but all I need is to be comforted by a big strong man” trope. She was so bitter that she even got mad at her mother for becoming “soft” and letting a man into her life. I appreciated how that subplot kind of helped Viola soften a bit as well, though. By the end of the book she was a little bit better, but many of the people who cared about her kind of just affirmed her bitter and rude behavior in the name of feminism rather than correcting it gently. She was also just needlessly mean even when there was no trigger. A minor annoyance would get her saying super rude stuff. I’m not one for victim blaming, but maybe there’s a reason people are mean to her if she’s mean to them first. Just because a guy says something rude to a girl doesn’t mean it’s because he’s sexist. Maybe two people just have a problem with each other. That’s another thing I didn’t like about this book – it made it seem as though personal conflicts with other people are actually global, systematic conflicts. Viola’s argument with her friend who wanted her to be nicer is a great example. She tried confronting Viola about her rudeness and Viola just started being rude to her because she thought her friend had some kind of internalized sexism going on. Nope, Viola was just being rude and the friend was trying to help her.

Duke was less annoying, and it helped that he started to appreciate the stuff Viola liked and got close to her through her passions. I thought that was a really cute way to show he cares about her and not anything surface-level. He liked her first without balking at her love for TTRPGs and such as an everyday football player might.

The side characters were very fun and Follmuth did an amazing job keeping them from dropping off into the shadows as Duke and Viola grew closer. Viola’s brother had chances to shine that I didn’t think he would, as did Duke’s ex-girlfriend. Every character added to the plot and helped Viola along her character arc in their own way.

I do have one note about the Christian youth pastor that Viola’s mom started dating partway through. I did not like how it was almost treated as a joke. Like the author picked the kind of guy least appealing to a teenager like Viola and it happened to be a Christian pastor. If he were a Muslim or Buddhist would the family have been making such a big deal out of it? Sometimes it seemed like the only reason the kids didn’t like him was because of his faith. It was also a little bit unrealistic. It’s one thing for a nominal Christian man to date a woman who has no desire to convert. But it’s another for a youth pastor and example to Christian teens to date a woman who has no desire to convert and spends her life breaking men’s hearts so she can write about them. I believe one should date to marry, and one should marry equally yoked. My last note on this guy was that his theology was dangerously faulty. Obviously a Christian did not write the book, but it is super obvious that Follmuth does not understand Christianity at all. At one point he even mentions a karma-based system? Like if you do good, good stuff will come your way. If a pastor is preaching that kind of thing to children, we have a problem. Anyway, I probably didn’t need to spend that much time talking about the pastor but it annoys me when I find no Christian reps in any books and then when I do, they’re terrible representations of the faith.

Twelfth Night gets a 3.5 star rating total, mostly for its entertainment factor at the end. The book really picked up for me when the two main characters left the “enemies” stage and moved into their friendship. They each helped the other become a better person and it made their characters more tolerable. The video game and TV show lore and fandom elements in this book added a sweet note of nostalgia and originality to a solid Shakespeare retelling.