REVIEW | Hamnet
RATING: 3/5
AUTHOR: Maggie O'Farrell
ISBN: 0525657606
ISBN13: 9780525657606
PUBLISHER: Knopf Publishing Group
RELEASE DATE: March 31st, 2020
PAGES, 310
EDITION LANGUAGE: English
SETTINGS: England
I read this book for the BookTube Prize of 2021, Octafinals Fiction group C.
This is a tale about the realization of womanhood and grieving of the lost child, it’s a story of a talented woman, who happened to be the wife of Shakespeare, Agnes, which is a fact that never mentioned in the book but everyone knows. The writing is fluent and the language is lyrical. However, to my disappointment, this is a beautifully written flat book.
The storytelling of the book did not live up to the winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction of last year. The supposed to be a unique point of view is too deliberate. By not mentioning the name of Shakespeare, the book portrays a bland character who, on the contrary, needs to be known to the reader as Shakespeare to be alive.
Cover of the UK edition
The story started from an ordinary dull day, with a boy called Hamnet exploring the house and forgetting the things he needed to do. Just like the day bored Hamnet, a large portion of the book at the beginning filled my reading with boredom. Besides the attractive literal writing, the first half of the book did not grab my interest.
Things did pick up on the second half of the book though when we see more about the personalities of Agnes and see the stories more from her eyes. However, a lot of plots are still underdeveloped. For example Agnes’ skills as a herbalist, and her ability of future telling. Those key fragments drove the story and created some of the major conflicts in the book, but unfortunately, they were too effortless and handed out to the readers as a premise.
I did like the theme of telling the story of Shakespeare’s wife and the death of his son from the perspective of his other family members. However, by jumping from perspectives to perspectives and different timelines, most of the characters in the book are underdeveloped (Shakespeare was the flattest one). And makes it very hard for me to empathize with the characters, let alone the whole book.