Vinegar Girl by Anne Tyler review – a sparky spin on Shakespeare

A brusque nursery school teacher is pitted against a Russian lab assistant in this intelligent revamp of The Taming of the Shrew

Dysfunctional family relationships are Anne Tyler’s forte, and her retelling of The Taming of the Shew, part of the Hogarth Press’s initiative to give Shakespeare plays a prose remodelling to mark the 400th anniversary of his death, gives her plenty to work with.

In Tyler’s revamping, the shrew is Kate Battista, an acerbic preschool teacher with a bad hairdo and an unapologetic line in abrasive truths (“I hate small children … They’re not very bright, if you’ve noticed”). Once a “thorny child” and a “sullen teenager”, Kate is now housekeeper and general dogsbody to her scientist father, the controlling and selfish Dr Battista, and her nubile teenage sister, Bunny. When a prestigious research project of Dr Battista’s is threatened by the imminent deportation of his brilliant Russian lab assistant, Pyotr Cherbakov, he decides to marry his eldest daughter off to get the young man a green card.

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