Booklist Reviews
*Starred Review* "How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together?" One ordinary afternoon in 1596, 11-year-old Hamnet's twin sister, Judith, is suddenly taken ill as the Black Death stalks Stratford's lanes. Hamnet's father is, as always, away in London. His mother, skilled with herbs and possessing a numinous second sight, recognizes she will lose one of her children. Yet even she is shocked when it is not Judith who dies, but Hamnet. Historical sources on Agnes (aka Anne) Hathaway Shakespeare are few, so O'Farrell's imagination freely ranges in this tale of deepest love and loss. Flashbacks document the Shakespeares' marriage; O'Farrell offering a gentler rendering than the traditional view. While Hamnet's death inspires aspects of Hamlet, Shakespeare is not the foremost player here ("He is all head, that one. All head, with not much sense."); rather, it is Agnes, vibrant, uncannily perceptive, who takes center stage. While O'Farrell encapsulates atmosphere through small sensory details—golden honey dripping from a comb, the smell of lavender sprinkled into a vat of soap—she is laser-focused on human connections, their ebb and flow, and how they can drown a person. This striking, painfully lovely novel captures the very nature of grief. Copyright 2020 Booklist Reviews.
BookPage Reviews
Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet is both a brilliant re-creation of the lives of William Shakespeare and his family in late 16th-century Stratford-upon-Avon and an emotionally intense account of the death of the dramatist's young son and its painful aftermath.
Told mostly through the eyes of Shakespeare's wife, herbalist and clairvoyant Agnes (known to history as Anne Hathaway), Hamnet shifts between the early 1580s, when she and William meet as he's tutoring her stepsiblings on their farm outside Stratford, and 1596, when the couple resides in a small apartment next to her in-laws' house. William struggles to escape his overbearing father and the family's glove-making business to pursue his writing career.
In a flawlessly executed chapter that's especially chilling in this time of global pandemic, O'Farrell traces the path of the bubonic plague from a glass-blowing factory near Venice to the Shakespeare home, where it afflicts Judith, the twin sister of 11-year-old Hamnet. Through a supernatural chain of events initiated by Hamnet, the disease passes from the girl to her sibling, and Agnes' joy at Judith's miraculous recovery is eclipsed by the horror of the boy's unexpected death. What follows is a vivid and heartbreaking portrait of grief, as Agnes tries to adjust to life without Hamnet, while William travels to London and moves forward as a celebrated playwright.
An award-winning writer who has published seven previous novels, O'Farrell excels at evoking the essence of the Shakespeares' daily lives in Stratford, from the claustrophobia of the family's dwelling to the beauty of Agnes' beloved forest, where she gathers plants to fashion her potions. But in addition to getting all the details right, O'Farrell succeeds in creating psychologically acute portraits of characters living at a distance of more than 400 years. Graceful and moving, Hamnet is a triumph of literary and historical fiction.
Copyright 2020 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
Imagining the life of the family Shakespeare left behind in Stratford makes an intriguing change of pace for a veteran storyteller. While O'Farrell eschews the sort of buried-secrets plots that drive the propulsive narratives of such previous novels as Instructions for a Heatwave (2013), her gifts for full-bodied characterization and sensitive rendering of intricate family bonds are on full display. She opens with 11-year-old Hamnet anxiously hovering over his twin sister, Judith, who has a mysterious fever and ominous swellings. When Hamnet asks his grandfather where his mother is, the old man strikes him, and as the novel moves through the characters' memories, we see the role John Shakespeare's brutality played in son Will's departure for London. The central figure in this drama is Shakespeare's wife, Agnes, better known to history as Anne, recipient of the infamous second-best-bed bequest in his will. O'Farrell chooses an alternate name—spelling was not uniform in Elizabethan times—and depicts Agnes as a woman whose profound engagement with the natural world drew young Will to her from the ir first meeting. The daughter of a reputed sorceress, Agnes has a mysterious gift: She can read people's natures and foresee their futures with a single touch. She sees the abilities within Will that are being smothered as a reluctant Latin tutor and inept participant in his father's glove trade, and it is Agnes who deftly maneuvers John into sending him away. She believes she will join Will soon, but Judith's frailty forestalls this. O'Farrell draws us into Agnes' mixed emotions as the years go by and she sees Will on his increasingly infrequent visits "inhabiting it—that life he was meant to live, that work he was intended to do." Hamnet's death—bitterly ironic, as he was always the stronger twin—drives the couple farther apart, and news of a new play called Hamlet sends Agnes to London in a rage. O'Farrell's complex, moving finale shows her watching the performance and honoring her husband's ability to turn their grief into art. A gripping drama of the conflict between love and destiny. Copyright Kirkus 2020 Kirkus/BPI Communications. All rights reserved.
Library Journal Reviews
Winner of Costa, Somerset Maugham, and Betty Trask honors, the ice-pick-perceptive O'Farrell (
Publishers Weekly Reviews
O'Farrell (