Shakespeare set Romeo and Juliet in Verona. Chloe Gong sets it in 1926 Shanghai, gives Juliet a gun and a flapper dress, and then drops a literal monster into the Huangpu River. I respect the audacity.
I was walking the lakefront with Denise on a Saturday morning, fog rolling off Lake Michigan, and the opening chapters of These Violent Delights hit exactly right — the haze, the tension, the sense of a city that's beautiful and rotting at the same time. Shanghai in the 1920s was this extraordinary collision point: colonial powers carving up territory, Communist organizers in back rooms, jazz clubs and opium dens existing in the same block. Gong gets that. She's not just borrowing the Bard's plot structure — she's asking what Romeo and Juliet looks like when the family feud is also a proxy war between Western imperialism and Chinese sovereignty. That's a question worth fourteen hours of your time.
When Your English Teacher Recognizes the Source Material (And It Still Works)
Let's talk about what Gong is really doing with the Shakespeare bones. Juliette Cai isn't some passive romantic lead waiting on a balcony. She's the heir to a criminal empire, raised partly in America, code-switching between languages and loyalties with a ferocity that feels earned rather than decorative. Roma Montagov — her Russian counterpart in the White Flowers gang — carries this bone-deep weariness that's less "brooding YA love interest" and more "young man who's already seen too much death and knows he'll see more." The tension between them isn't just romantic. It's political, cultural, generational. My students would hate this. I love it.
The monster plot — people literally clawing their own throats out — is genuinely unsettling. It's body horror grafted onto historical fiction, and I kept waiting for it to feel gimmicky, but Gong uses the contagion as a pressure cooker. The gangs can't afford to keep fighting each other when something is killing their people from the inside. So Juliette and Roma have to work together, which means navigating four years of betrayal and heartbreak while also, you know, trying not to die. The prose deserves to be savored, especially in the descriptive passages about Shanghai's streets — Gong writes the city like it's a character with its own appetites.
But I'll be honest: the book runs long. Fourteen hours is a lot of real estate, and there are stretches in the middle where the pacing goes soft. Side characters multiply — cousins, lieutenants, Communist sympathizers, a French girl — and while Gong clearly has plans for all of them (this is a series opener), some of the subplots feel like setup without payoff. If you loved The Great Gatsby reimagined through a lens that actually centers the people history usually ignores, this is its spiritual successor. But it asks for patience. The patience requirement reminded me of my experience with Paris Apartment — another atmospheric novel that bets heavily on place and slow-burn tension, and asks you to trust that the setup is worth it.
Cindy Kay's Whisper Problem
Here's where it gets complicated. Cindy Kay nails the two leads. Her Juliette has this coiled fury — you can hear the girl who's performing confidence while terrified of losing control. Her Roma sounds tired in a way that's specific, not lazy. These aren't generic "sad boy" and "tough girl" voices. Kay leans into Juliette's rage and Roma's weariness effectively, and the emotional scenes between them land.
But — and this is a real but — Kay has a whispering problem. Lines that are clearly meant to be shouted come out in this hushed, almost ASMR-adjacent delivery. It flattens the action scenes. When gangsters are shooting at each other across a Shanghai rooftop, I need volume, urgency, breath. Instead, I got the same measured murmur I'd been hearing during quiet conversations. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation — but she doesn't always understand that volume is, too.
Secondary characters blur together. There are enough side players in this book to populate a small drama department, and Kay doesn't always give them enough differentiation. I found myself rewinding to figure out who was talking, which is not what you want when you're supposed to be paying attention to Principal Martinez's thoughts on standardized testing schedules. (Worth pausing the faculty meeting for, but only for the Juliette-Roma scenes.)
Who Gets to Tell These Stories
This is why we still read the classics — and why we need writers like Gong rewriting them. Setting Shakespeare's most famous love story in colonial Shanghai isn't a gimmick. It's a reclamation. The power dynamics, the cultural erasure, the question of who gets to control a city's future — all of it maps onto the original text in ways that made this twenty-year English teacher sit up straighter.
If you want lush historical atmosphere and star-crossed romance with real political teeth, grab this. If whispered narration drives you up a wall, consider bumping the speed to 1.15x — it doesn't fix the volume issue, but it tightens the pacing in the saggy middle. And if you're a Shakespeare nerd who thinks adaptations are beneath the source material, well. I used to think audiobooks were cheating, too. We grow.
The Assignment
A flawed but ambitious listen. The story earns its length about seventy percent of the time, and when it's firing — Juliette standing in a blood-soaked alley choosing between love and legacy — it's electric. Kay's narration is a B+ that could've been an A with more dynamic range. I'll be coming back for the sequel, probably during another faculty meeting. Don't tell Martinez.
