This is a terrific product, and the kids will love having it read to them or, for the over eights, reading it themselves. It's a tragedy, of course, and while the complexity is simplified for younger readers, it's no less gruesome than the original, but as with all the brief novelisations from this Shakespeare Stories series it offers plenty of bang for buck.

It's about a twenty minute read so is perfectly feasible to get through in a single sitting, and is expertly paced, elegantly written, the dialogue has a pleasingly hammable air (I found myself adopting accents and being quite the dramatist as I read it to my boys), and it succeeds very well in accentuating the major dramatic and figurative themes of the play, and includes a couple of pages of summary and context at the end. So much so that it's really not a bad encapsulation of the story for any reader without the inclination to wade through the bard's own iambic pentameter.

It is typeset in nice big text and there are (Quentin) Blake-esque pen and ink illustrations dotted liberally thoughout, so this would be a pretty good self-reader too, for the eight to twelve bracket.