Vinegar Girl is a twist on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. I never read the original version of the story, but I enjoyed this one.

As 29-year old Kate, who has walked away from her higher education, toils taking care of her father and young sister’s household needs, including laundry, shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc., while working as a teacher’s assistant at a pre-school. Younger sister Bunny is footloose and fancy free at 15 and the girls’ Father is working tirelessly as a research scientist.

Kate is endearing with her mater-of-fact way and comments but walks a thin line with her employer because of it. When her father plays matchmaker with his lab assistant, Pyotr, Kate agrees to a marriage on paper for purposes of immigration. There’s a debacle at the lab on the day of the wedding, but like all good and decent rom-coms, all’s well that ends well.

Vinegar Girl is an easy read with some cute, quirky characters written wonderfully by Anne Tyler. ( )

A fun update to The Taming of the Shrew - even more appreciated after reading an interview with Tyler about her struggle with Shakespeare's original treatment of Kate. Hopefully someone in Hollywood picks this up as a good rom-com. As usual with Tyler's more upbeat novels the protagonist starts off stuck and then works their way to getting unstuck. Charming and zips right along. And I just loved Ptyor's question "why would you want to attract flies?" when Kate shares the American saying that "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar." ( )

I thought I'd enjoy a retelling of Taming of the Shrew by an author whose work I have enjoyed in the past; instead I felt like I wasted my reading time on a childish and completely unmoving "romance". I gave it two stars because I finished it but honestly, had it taken me more than a day to read it I'd have been more irritated and knocked it down to one. ( )

Dumb. Waste of time, though painless.

Anne Taylor is my favorite author, and this one is my favorite so far. Vinegar Girl is Anne Taylor's take on William Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

Kate Barrista is stuck in an unsatisfactory life. She started college to be a botanist. But. when she argued with a professor over a basic principle of botany, the professor left college. Her aunt found her a job as a kindergarten assistant but that was not her thing, and she rebelled against the school's rules of behavior. Now, on probation again, she still prepared her father's lunch for him to take to the lab and made a "meat mash" for dinner with her father and her teenage sister.

Her father was very well known for his work in autoimmune research and gave up teaching to devote full-time attention to that. He finally found an assistant that he could work with and there was one drawback, Pyotr's Visa was almost up.

He wants Kate to marry Pyotr to keep him on the project. It is the only solution.

You will find dialogue so engaging that you will want to say the lines out loud and rock with laughter all the way through this book. I am sure that you will love this book! ( )