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From Cooperative Children's Book Center (CCBC)

Fourteen-year-old Widge is an orphan living in a small village in Elizabethan England. Theater owner Simon Bass has just purchased Widge from the minister to whom Widge was apprenticed, intent on having the boy steal Shakespeare's new play, Hamlet. Widge's job is to sit in the audience of the Globe Theater in London and copy the play down word for word as it is performed, using the special shorthand method that the minister had taught him. To make sure Widge follows through, Bass sends him to London in the company of the harsh and mysterious Falconer, a man who conjures images of the devil and Death in Widge's lively mind. Widge, who has never been out of rural England, is as awed by the drama of the theater as he is by the grand and dangerous city of London. Swept up in the action of the first performance of Hamlet that he attends, he fails to write most of it down. Fearful of Falconer's reaction, he returns to the theater intent on stealing the one written copy of the play. Instead, Widge slips out of Falconer's grasp and into the embrace of the company of actors at the Globe, where he is taken on as an errand boy and apprentice to a life on the stage. But the shadow of fear never leaves Widge--he knows Falconer is still in the city, watching for him, waiting for him to produce a copy of the play.Tension, drama, and period details heighten the reading experience of this highly original, fast-paced story with a colorful cast of characters. (Ages 10-13)

CCBC Choices 1998 © Cooperative Children's Book Center, Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison, 1998. Used with permission.

From Publisher's Weekly

July 3, 2000
This tale of a 14-year-old Yorkshire orphan sent by a rival theater manager to steal the as-yet-unpublished Hamlet in 1601 London "excels in the lively depictions of Elizabethan stagecraft and street life," wrote PW. Ages 10-14.

From Publisher's Weekly

May 4, 1998
A myriad of anachronisms mar this predictable tale of a Yorkshire orphan. Widge, the 14-year-old narrator, is sent by a rival theater manager to steal the as-yet-unpublished Hamlet in 1601 London and ends up an apprenticing actor instead. Blackwood (Wild Timothy), a playwright and amateur actor himself, clearly knows Shakespeare, but is a bit cloudy on some details of the Elizabethan era. Widge mentions square city blocks, describes his dinner kept warm on the back of the stove and notes that a man wounded in a duel had recovered in a hospital--this in an age of unplanned cities, meals cooked over open fires and hospitals that were for terminally ill paupers. Blackwood excels, however, in the lively depictions of Elizabethan stagecraft and street life. Lonely outcast Widge is a sympathetic character, but his frequent shifts in voice from Yorkshire dialect to 20th-century American slang may be disconcerting to readers, and the villainy of Widge's nemesis seems all too familiar. Ages 9-12.

From AudioFile Magazine

Words are ever at play in Gary Blackwood's historical novel. Through twists of fate, circumstance, and companions, Widge, an orphan, comes to learn the art of charactery, a type of shorthand, and then sets out in search of the text of Shakespeare's newly written play, HAMLET. Ron Keith's distinctive British voice transports the listener to Elizabethan England and propels the quest for The Book through the streets, onto the stage, and to its suspenseful conclusion. Through Keith's intonation, modulation, and variation, the story's characters are as rough as the players in rehearsal or as polished as the queen after a "command performance." This book would be a fabulous and enriching listen for middle-grade students as they study a Shakespeare play or Elizabethan England. A.R. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine