Nathan, Isabel, and Suresh, a motley group of misfits, are trying to go back in time to the year 1613. Nathan, who got caught cheating in English class, wants to make sure Shakespeare\u2019s plays are destroyed in the Globe Theatre fire so no one will ever have to study them. Isabel longs to meet her deceased English professor father\u2019s literary hero. And Suresh, who threw a time-traveler party inspired by Stephen Hawking, \u201cseems game and needs no convincing.\u201d But the trio instead accidentally land in 1592\u2014and lose their time machine. Japanese Canadian Nathan and Sri Lankan Canadian Suresh soon find that the racism they face in modern times is just as prevalent and dangerous in the 16th century (Isabel is white). The teens encounter assorted historical figures, including astronomer John Dee and explorer Sir Francis Drake, as well as the titular playwright. Unfortunately, the plot wanders incomprehensibly at times, dropping plot threads; the confusion is made worse by the difficulty of distinguishing among the multiple narrators\u2019 voices. Kankesan never establishes a clear, cohesive tone for the novel and instead bounces unpredictably from irreverent comedy to treatises on colonialism to scientific musings on the space-time continuum. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nathan, Isabel, and Suresh, a motley group of misfits, are trying to go back in time to the year 1613. Nathan, who got caught cheating in English class, wants to make sure Shakespeare\u2019s plays are destroyed in the Globe Theatre fire so no one will ever have to study them. Isabel longs to meet her […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":916,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}