What I’ll have to do is, I’ll have to read that play.

                   (J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye)

The greatest play by the greatest playwright, Hamlet has over the centuries daunted readers far older than Holden Caulfield. Today, however, he would have another choice: he could read the novel of the play, and one written especially for his age group. John Marsden, the Pied Piper of Australian YA literature, has decided to lead his vast army of devotees into Shakespeare country – to be specific, Elsinore. And why not? The progress from adolescence to maturity is the very stuff of YA fiction, and Hamlet is a story about growing up. Most stage Hamlets are too old. Holden describes the Danish prince as a ‘sad, screwed-up type guy’, and one of the defining features of Marsden’s often dark fiction is exactly this kind of young protagonist.