Indulgent, knowledgeable readers may attribute this to a fidelity to Romantic excess, while others will find it dramatically overblown and sometimes tedious. Although the prose is undeniably artful, its studied prettiness often overruns its subject, belaboring small moments and attenuating the anticlimactic plot. Eventually, she takes her own life, but only after relating everything she knows about Byron to Keats for his hagiographic account of the young sex god. Shelly is portrayed as the girl next door whose obsessive love for Byron is destined to remain unrequited, so she turns her energies instead to highlighting social causes. Byron’s biography follows as closely as possible that of his literary counterpart, focusing on his sexually abusive governess, his relationships with his sister and cousin, and his sexual precocity, which he turns to stunning prowess in this version by the time he’s fourteen, making him miles too arch and worldly to play convincingly as a teen.

The bulk of the narrative, however, is retrospective, featuring Keats telling the life of Byron in a style that is reminiscent of Nick’s fascination with Gatsby. The story begins with the mysterious death of Shelly Byron has convinced Keats to steal her ashes so that they can scatter them over the beach she loved. Here, Roth imagines the turbulent trio as contemporary high-schoolers in Ohio, with John Keats as the younger working-class narrator convinced that he will follow all of his family members to an early grave, Gordon Byron as the charismatic teen-author star, and Shelly Shelley a composite of Mary and Percy, abused by her father and hopelessly in love with Byron.

The poetry of Byron, Keats, and Shelley has starred in many a tenth-grader’s test nightmare, but their lives never fail to titillate.

So Shelly by Ty Roth