i am not usually a historical fiction reader .. so i was pleasantly surprised by hamnet. this is an imaginative story - based on a few known events - but mostly the author's creative retelling. the writing is poetic, telling a story of love and loss and deep grief.  hamnet is about shakespeare’s family - we witness his relationship with his wife, agnes, spark (it's a little instalove) and then develop over the years. his three children are born (susanna, and then the twins hamnet & judith). we see the impact of hamnet’s young death … and the premiere of the play hamlet four years later.

other reviewers have tackled this, but i found the weakest point to be agnes' otherworldliness/the power of always knowing. 

it was kind of .. peculiar .. that the character of shakespeare is very purposefully never referred to by name.

i believe the intention was so he wouldn’t draw focus away from the other characters, and also to perhaps better humanize him. but i do still think someone could have occasionally addressed him as "will" instead of the husband, the father, the latin tutor, etc. the effort to not name him was sometimes more distracting than ACTUALLY naming him would have been. 

i found most of the writing to be lyrical and engaging. there were some incredibly poetic descriptions of grief and love that spoke to me. but .. there were also moments of slowness that just made me wish i could skip ahead. i was often ready to get on with the action!

the author does PILE ON  the adjectives which sometimes i found charming .. and other times i just had to roll my eyes at how ridiculously ornate it was. but then again, maggie o’farrell got me to pretty deeply care about a flea!

this is definitely a book i would return to again - though i’d probably breeze by certain parts that lagged .

 

CW: child death, grief, death, abuse, terminal illness, animal death, infidelity