THE DECEIVED ONES

Krummeck offers a retelling of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, set against the contemporary backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic and with characters fleeing the war in Ukraine.

Twin siblings Vira and Sevastyan Blyzinskyj leave Ukraine separately as refugees, months apart. Vira is attacked on the street in Baltimore and loses her phone, severing communication with her brother and setting up her decision to dress as Sevastyan to appear more confident and imposing in public. She falls into work with successful composer Orson and a mission to convince grieving soprano Isabella Foiani to join Orson’s opera production—which, as it happens, is related to Twelfth Night itself. With all the layering, readers familiar with Twelfth Night will have an easier time slipping into this novel than those who aren’t; Krummeck tells the story through a rotating, close third-person perspective encompassing nine different characters. Bardolators will easily pair Krummeck’s players with archetypes they already know (Sevastyan/Sebastian; Orson/Orsino); indeed, much of what makes this novel successful are moments when the text hews close to Shakespeare’s original plot. Chapters are fast-paced, and the over-the-top quality of the love rectangle that ensues results in slapstick humor—almost as if the characters are shouting their lines before running offstage for a quick set-change. It also engagingly articulates the beauty of music: “The way the musical phrases touch, then blend and interweave is almost discordant, but not quite—they flirt, they dart away.” When the book takes itself most seriously, though, it falls flat, leaning heavily on overwrought dialogue and fetishizing descriptions of characters’ skin tones and physicality: “gray eyes and a cloud of black hair offsetting a lustrous skin tone that made him think of a finely polished violin.”

An ambitious but unevenly executed Shakespearean romp.