Koom Kankesan (Credit: Christos Aslanidis)

Killing Shakespeare, the new young adult novel from Toronto writer and teacher Koom Kankesan, begins with a compelling premise: if presented with the opportunity to go back in time, what would three contemporary Scarborough teenagers do?

The three teenagers are: Isabel, who is still dealing with the recent death of her father, an English professor who gave his daughter a love for Shakespeare; Nathan, a volatile football player and troublemaker who locks Ms. Sullivan, their English teacher, in a classroom closet during a class; and Suresh, a thoughtful, geeky student, who posts a video of the incident, which results in Nathan getting suspended. It’s Suresh who decides to throw a time travellers party, based on the concept by Stephen Hawking: “If people from the future find one of these invitations, and if they can time-travel, they’ll attend the party and prove to us that time-travel exists.”

When a time traveller arrives, and the trio take possession of his device, it is Nathan, however, who determines their destination: London, 1613. “I want to go back to that production of Henry VIII, the one Sullivan talked about where the Globe caught fire and everything burned. That production where some unknown person saved the manuscripts. I want to make sure all of them burn. Then we’ll come back here and there’ll be no more Shakespeare to study. Generations of students before us and generations of students after us will be saved.” Things do not go as planned – to no reader’s surprise – and the trio finds themselves in 1592. When they lose their time travel device there is no way home. Stranded in Elizabethan London, the three take differing – though interweaving – paths to make their way in the world, in the company of personages including privateer Francis Drake, alchemist John Dee, and a certain playwright from Stratford. But their arrival and continued presence has done something to the world, and to time itself.

Killing Shakespeare is a rollicking adventure and a wonderful immersion into life in Shakespeare’s time. Kankesan’s research is thorough, and there is a delightful frisson in exploring the history – real and alternate – behind the literature. Character development is limited – the events of the novel seem to affirm each of the trio’s personalities, rather than showing any significant change – but the narrative itself is delightfully unhinged. To say that there are twists the reader won’t see coming is a vast understatement, and the novel becomes a thrill ride in its second half. It is also, it should be noted, a thoughtful exploration of such subjects as gender roles, colonialism, racism, and the nature of time itself.