Reading Willing: A Shakespearean Romp felt a bit like getting dragged into a community theatre green room, handed a mug of cheap coffee, and told, “By the way, that short guy in the ruff is actually William Shakespeare.” The novel is a comic time travel story set in 1999 in Nelson, where Shakespeare dies in the Globe fire of 1613, then wakes up confused on a lakeside lawn and stumbles into a small-town production of As You Like It. He’s adopted by a circle of actors, a schoolteacher, and a librarian, cast as the old servant Adam, and slowly everyone edges toward the truth of who he is while he wrestles with whether to stay in this “New World” or try to get home. The ending folds into an epilogue where his new friends turn his story into a book and a set of odd sonnets about things like traffic and spaghetti, while the theatre moves on to a hit production of Much Ado About Nothing. It is, very squarely, a comic time travel novel with a heavy dose of theatre geekery and a warm, ensemble feel.

What hooked me most was Shakespeare’s voice. The author leans into the idea from the preface that he is using David Crystal’s work on original pronunciation, so Will talks in an English that feels half familiar and half off-kilter. He says “devil-carriages” for cars, gawks at light switches like they are sorcery, and gets genuinely excited about the public library and its “thousands” of books. His archaic phrasing never feels like a gimmick; it feels like he is struggling hard to make sense of everything, and that gives the comedy real heart. There are a lot of fish-out-of-water jokes around water fountains, skateboards, and jet contrails, but I didn’t feel like the book was laughing at him. It was more like watching a very smart friend learn a new language in real time. The community theatre scenes are also spot on. The auditions, the nervous director Heather Bannister, the slightly hungover “assistant,” the desperate scramble to find the right Adam and the right Duke, then the thrill of opening night with its minor injuries and big ovations, all felt painfully, lovingly accurate.

As the story goes on, though, it is not just a string of gags about Elizabethan guy discovers airplanes. The book spends time on the people around him, especially Ken, the teacher-actor who takes him in, Julia the prickly teenage daughter, and Bonnie, the librarian who sees straight through him and loves him anyway. I liked how gently the book lets their lives be changed by this impossible guest. By the time we get to the New Year’s Eve “science experiment” that might fling William back across universes, there is a quiet sadness underneath the jokes about alchemy and physics. The way he looks at airplane tickets to London and at Bonnie’s face at the same time hit me harder than I expected. And the epilogue, lands as a sweet little meditation on who gets to “own” Shakespeare, and how art keeps echoing in small places, far away from big-city stages. I found myself moved by the idea that his legacy here is not some grand cosmic revelation, but a tighter-knit little theatre community, a father and daughter who are less broken, and a librarian who finally takes a trip.

Style-wise, it reads light and friendly, even when it touches on grief, aging, and regret. The prose is straightforward, with the odd flourish that feels earned, like when the sky is full of crossing contrails that look to William like “the writ of angels.” The rhythm of the scenes is conversational: banter at the audition table, small talk over spaghetti, awkward questions about “maid” vs “daughter” at the dinner table. If you’re not already at least mildly into Shakespeare, some of the references and in-jokes will probably slide by. But I appreciated that it never sank into heavy-handed “meta” territory. It stayed more like a long, warm rehearsal process where everyone gradually figures out what play they are really in.

By the time I closed the book, I felt like I had just spent a summer hanging around a scrappy theatre company while an impossible guest quietly changed the temperature of the room. I would recommend this comic time travel novel most to readers who already have some affection for Shakespeare’s plays, who like stories about rehearsal rooms and small towns, and who enjoy gentle speculative fiction that cares more about people than about the mechanics of time travel. If you have ever fallen a little in love with a cast, or lost an afternoon in a public library, you are probably the right audience for Willing: A Shakespearean Romp and its kind, theatrical heart.

Pages: 298 | ASIN : B0FW2NXP6G