The Steep and Thorny Way: A New YA Hamlet

The Steep and Thorny Way (2016) by Cat Winters joins a long list of recent Hamlet re-imaginings published for teens, including John Marsden’s Hamlet (2008), Dot Hutchinson’s A Wounded Name (2013), and of course Lisa Klein’s often-cited Ophelia (2006), to say nothing of Ryan North’s chooseable path adventure To Be or Not To Be (2013). When YA authors seek a female protagonist for a Hamlet appropriation, they usually turn to Ophelia. But Winters gender-swaps the lead, translating Hamlet to a biracial teenaged girl, Claudius to a potential member of the Ku Klux Klan, and Elsinore to a sleepy, poverty-ridden town in Prohibiton-era Oregon.

Hamlet is Hanalee Denney, grieving for her black father’s recent death and unsettled by the hasty marriage of her white mother, Greta, to white family friend and town doctor Clyde Koning. When the alleged killer, Joe Adder, is released from jail and returns to town, Hanalee is desperate for revenge and starts to hear rumors of her father’s unquiet ghost. Despite the concerns of her best friend Fleur and the ominous warnings of Fleur’s brother Laurence, Hanalee seeks the ghost out. His words set Hanalee on a dangerous path of hidden motives and unlikely alliances: joining forces with Joe Adder, who protests his innocence, she is determined to discover the truth and punish the true murderer.

Winters cleverly embodies King Hamlet’s supposed cause of death—a serpent—into the wrongfully accused Joe Adder, whose supposed guilt, Hanalee is led…