Made Glorious
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In a vicious, delicious contemporary novel inspired by Shakespeare’s Richard III, the lauded author of The Family Fortuna lifts the curtain on a high school thespian who’ll stop at nothing to land the lead. Rory is an antihero for the ages. Like Shakespeare’s Richard III, she confides in her audience, telling us exactly the lengths she’ll go to to secure the leading role in Bosworth Academy’s senior musical, confessing without shame that she is charming and conniving and brutally ambitious, that we will watch and root for her even as she manipulates and endangers those around her. And we do. Perhaps it’s because we don’t want to believe that she’s as relentless as she claims. Rory is an underdog, after all, a scholarship kid teased for her weight. Surely there will be redemption? Surely our dread and patience will be rewarded? Intricately plotted with an ingenious narrative that blends multiple viewpoints with script excerpts and an original musical score, Lindsay Eagar’s whip-smart, precision-crafted, and gleefully compulsive page-turner taps into the dark side of high school theater production. A diabolically good read, it forces our complicity as we wince and cheer for an arresting drama queen who just can’t help going full-tilt nasty in the pursuit of her dreams.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A teen thespian launches a Machiavellian campaign to land a starring role in this fiendish Richard III homage from Eagar (The Family Fortuna). After years of fervent devotion to the Bosworth Academy drama club, which included buying her own costumes when the club's closet couldn't accommodate her full figure's "sizing needs," senior Rory King is sick of being relegated to the ensemble. With only one semester remaining before graduation, Rory takes matters into her own hands, hatching a diabolical plot to secure the female lead in the spring musical. Never mind that she'll have to ruin some lives to make her plan work, or that these machinations might distract from her schoolwork, thus jeopardizing her chances at a much-needed scholarship. Rory has paid her dues; now it's her time to shine. With myriad metafictional flourishes, the tale unfolds in five acts in third-person-present narration, which Eagar intercuts with scenes written like script excerpts, fourth-wall-breaking monologues from Rory, and even a musical score. An intersectionally diverse cast of nuanced characters adds depth; Rory, in particular, is a sympathetic antihero whose pain, desperation, and loneliness color every deed. Ages 14–up.
