Shakespeare in South Florida

In this coming-of-age novel, a 17-year-old virgin, Joey Caldo, experiences first love, first sex, and first heartbreak in the surreal setting of South Florida as he learns about the tragicomedy of Shakespeare.

Caldo has a theory for everything. His biggest being that women see guys as films. Caldo is definitely no blockbuster, he’s more of an arthouse film that only a few select connoisseurs could ever love. Seeing everyone he knows getting coupled and enjoying the warm weather of South Florida, Caldo is left to freeze in an un-Flordiain-like darkness.

That is until he meets Alexia at his grandmother’s retirement home. Alexia was court-ordered to do volunteer work for her DUI but it’s cool, Caldo has issues too, and it feels like they have a real connection. But there’s also Valerie. The new girl at Caldo’s awkwardly small school. She’s a straight-A student who is attending on scholarship and is assigned the difficult task, to mentor him in Shakespeare’s plays. The polar opposites have nothing in common except for being romantics who do nothing but fail at romance.

Caldo learns that Shakespeare wrote two things: comedies and tragedies. Both of which he finds uncomfortably relatable while approaching the precipice of adulthood. Through tragically funny, and semi-well-meaning, romantic-mishaps, Caldo learns all too well that we know what we are, but know not what we may be and that love is blind, and lovers cannot see.