**Teaser Tuesday ~ #16**

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

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The Total Tragedy of a Girl Named Hamlet by Erin Dionne

Release Date: January 7, 2010

Genre: Middle Grade

Synopsis

Hamlet Kennedy just wants to be your average, happy, vanilla eighth grader. But with Shakespearean scholar parents who dress in Elizabethan regalia and generally go about in public as if it were the sixteenth century, that's not terribly easy. It gets worse when they decide that Hamlet's genius seven year-old sister will attend middle school with her - and even worse when the Shakespeare project is announced and her sister is named the new math tutor. By the time an in-class recitation reveals that our heroine is an extraordinary Shakespearean actress, Hamlet can no longer hide from the fact that she - like her family - is anything but average. In a novel every bit as funny as her debut, Erin Dionne has created another eighth grader whose situation is utterly unique - but whose foibles and farces will resound with every girl currently suffering through middle school.

***Teaser***

See, Mom and Dad are Shakespeare scholars (that purple cloak gave it away, right?). Mom's into the tragedies and histories, Dad teaches the sonnets and comedies. Together, they're a collection of "if thous, then thees."

When they had me, Hamlet was the play they both liked the best...and they thought naming me Ophelia, after Hamlet's suicidal girlfriend, would be too morbid. So I ended up with not just any boy's name, but the name of a tragic Denmakian prince who spoke  to skulls and had a thing for his mother. So I'm a little touchy about it. Unsurprisingly, Dezzie thinks her name is cool. It's from another play, Othello. She's named for Othello's wife, who is killed in a jealous rage...yet that wasn't too weird for my parents. Go figure.