The novel “The Serpent’s Tongue” by Jonathan Macho was published for the first time in 2020.
A school trip to Stratford-upon-Avon becomes another fight against aliens for Lucy Wilson and Hobo. Thanks to the ring given to her by Anne Travers, Lucy manages to travel through time and together with Hobo manages to defeat the Ursinians. The two of them also find time to make a new friend in Louise, a local girl who is a big William Shakespeare fan and is celebrating the Bard’s jubilee.
When Louise joins her new friends and follows them on their journey back to the 21st century, her presence becomes a problem, as she raises questions from parents and teachers. It’s hardly the biggest problem because two entities using the names Prospero and Puck are watching over them.
The series “The Lucy Wilson Mysteries” tells the adventures of the granddaughter of Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart, a character who became famous in the TV show “Doctor Who“. It’s a series aimed at young readers with novels that are much shorter than the normal series connected to this saga. The stories almost exclusively include fictional characters created for other short stories and novels, and only occasionally characters that appeared in the TV show.
“The Serpent’s Tongue” is a novel structured as a play for a great homage to William Shakespeare. The Bard certainly doesn’t need any publicity but Lucy Wilson has a less than enthusiastic attitude towards him. She’s a good student because she’s very smart and her attitude suggests that Shakespeare’s works are the subject of study in British schools but are considered boring by many students. Jonathan Macho uses this novel to give readers who had that kind of negative experience a different perception of Shakespeare.
The presence of the Ursinian aliens is an excuse to advance a plot full of more or less explicit references to William Shakespeare’s works. Louise talks about them all the time, at least when she’s not trying to figure out something about the 21st century. Her character is used to actively promote the Bard’s works, also explaining that they are stage plays and reading them in school is a substitute that has a much lower value.
Louise doesn’t have a formal education in the modern sense but she has been able to watch performances of Shakespeare’s plays since she was a child, so she had the chance to appreciate them for what they really are. Her perception of the Bard isn’t of an author she was forced to study with the aggravating circumstance of having enjoyed his works in a partial and somehow distorted way. The consequence is that the emotions he arouses in her are practically the opposite of Lucy Wilson’s.
The two entities that observe the protagonists from the beginning use the names Prospero and Puck, two characters from William Shakespeare’s works, “The Tempest” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, respectively. For a good part of the novel, they treat everything as a stage on which a work is performed and they influence the plot in various ways.
In the end, “The Serpent’s Tongue” is a novel that doesn’t require knowledge of William Shakespeare’s works but is probably more enjoyable for readers who can recognize those references. It may intrigue readers who know little or nothing about the Bard. Its unusual structure for a novel may be complex for a child but a teenage reader should already be able to understand it and appreciate its contents. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada.
