Book – Verily A New Hope

Book – Verily A New Hope
Full title : William Shakespear's Star Wars : Verily, a new hope

By : Ian Doescher 

Iillustrations : Nicolas Delort

Score : 8.5/10
Year : 2013

Publisher : Quirk Books 

ISBN 9781594746376

Pages : 174

Language : English 


As he explains at the end, Ian Doescher's love for both Star Wars and Shakespear's plays combined into this project, his very first book, which would become a series after its success : he imagined a play, in 5 acts, to tell the story of Star Wars : a new hope, using iambic pentameter (wiki's definition). 




If you've seen the movie in any of its versions, you won't be surprised as to the story told here ; it merely adds internal thoughts and possible dialogues based on the story, but not expanding any of it. 

Just like any play, you'll see names of characters as they enter, speak and/or think, and exit the scene ; the novelty in this book is that it presents the play, written mostly in modern, easy to understand English, inserting at times old-timey English à-la-Shakespear in a rather balanced way and usually easy to follow. In fact, I had to check just a couple of words in a rather fluid reading. 

Characters are mostly identitcal to their movie-counterpart, albeit a bit exaggerated as per a play- especially C3PO, whilst R2D2 gets "side" dialogues/thoughts, before his usual beeps... 

Verily, it's a funny book to read ! but, sometimes I was aware that what I was reading was supposed to be funny, yet I didn't laugh. In other occasions, I did. It's because of this dual effect that I have to give it a solid 8/10, it's different and was short and fast enough to finish, that it helped me to catch up with my reading challenge (you'll know all about it at the end of the year, or early 2020, when I tell that tale).