The Hundred Loves of Juliet

I am not giving this book a formal rating because of the author's afterword, which reveals that her husband has a chronic and potentially fatal illness. I just can't bring myself to screw up her GR average, because she is obviously writing from a place of great pain and uncertainty.Having said that, THIS BOOK IS RIDICULOUS. Do you believe that Shakespeare's [b:Romeo and Juliet 18135 Romeo and Juliet William Shakespeare https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1629680008l/18135.SY75.jpg 3349450] was the greatest love story of all time? Would you buy the premise that Romeo lived, but was cursed with immortality, doomed to find - and lose - Juliet over and over again through the centuries? And that his latest Juliet, aka Helene, has just shown up in his tiny Alaskan town to write a novel (ugh), coincidentally based on her numerous dreams about a hunky guy who looks just like him?The writing would have to be pretty special to make me suspend disbelief for all of the above and unfortunately it's not. Helene and Sebastian (Romeo's current moniker) have no chemistry even though the author tells us repeatedly they are eternal soulmates. Sebastian is so perfect that, as captain of a king crab fishing boat, HE RESCUES A BABY POLAR BEAR who is stuck on the ice, turns the ship around, and brings the cub back to town so it can be raised and then released back into the wild. OTOH, Helene's ex-husband is so eeeeeevil that he might as well enter with “You must pay the rent!” and exit with “Curses, foiled again!” The vignettes of previous “Romeo & Juliet” couples are written with extremely broad historical strokes, and the tragic ending for each doomed Juliet starts to be kind of comical after a while (how many different ways can she be killed off?) There is something creepy about Sebastian commenting on Helene's behavior as being identical to “his Juliets” of the past, as if he doesn't see Helene as her own person. Of course our hero is fabulously rich, after accumulating wealth over the past 700 years, so the neutralizing of the Evil Ex can happen with a single phone call. There is more genuine emotion in the author's afterword than there is in the entire 300 page story that precedes it. I haven't read Skye's previous YA books but I hope they are stronger than this one. At the moment I don't have a strong desire to find out.