In this contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s Richard III, Rory King is a scholarship student at Bosworth Academy. Rory (white) exists on the edges of high school life, knowing she doesn’t fit in at Bosworth. But she’s also a senior; one who’s paid her dues in the theater department and wants her just reward: the leading role in the spring musical. It’s a reward Rory knows won’t be bestowed upon her, so she’s going to take it. Rory’s never had more than a single line in a play, but humility, helpfulness, and assurance that she’s fine (following the suggestion of a previous suicide attempt) are roles she carries out with finesse while enacting an insidious, calculating plan. Like Shakespeare’s Richard in his quest to be king, she’ll let no one get in her way—not her mom, her only friends, the theater teacher who rules the drama department, or the English teacher who’s mentored her. Unthreatening and unassuming on the surface, Rory is brilliant and driven, her relationship to morality and reality ungrounded. Her plan comes to fruition, step by increasingly disturbing step, in a twisty story that sees Rory’s unreliable narration shifts from first to third person—sometimes moving between them—and across various forms, primarily prose but also script and musical score. Increasingly compelling and unsettling, the story also offers Rory’s entertaining, insightful yet skewed perspective on fellow theater kids and other peers, her teachers, and others in this literary novel with mature content and themes.