Emily May's Reviews > Hamnet

I’m sorry. I feel like I’m letting down all the people I just fangirled over The Marriage Portrait with, all the people who excitedly urged me to read Hamnet as well, but I just did not enjoy this anywhere near as much.

I felt that The Marriage Portrait was more polished in terms of its writing, whereas this one’s prose went a bit too purple for me. Parts seemed overwritten. Maybe it wasn't that different-- because, to be fair, TMP certainly went heavy on description-- but it felt like it, perhaps because this style of writing seemed more suited to the courts of the Italian Renaissance than to the countryside of Stratford-upon-Avon. But either way I really struggled to get into it.

Part of the reason this might not have worked is very specific to me-- I am a big Shakespeare lover. I've read all the plays, seen a good many of them, and have sought out every detail of his life… to the point where it felt oddly like I was reading fanfiction. I mean this not as a slight to the author, but just as a comment on myself. I was completely absorbed in Lucrezia's story in The Marriage Portrait, yet I never quite suspended disbelief with this one. I never became immersed in the story and began to feel it was real.

Another likely reason for this is that Hamnet does not hone in on any one character as The Marriage Portrait did. I slid right inside Lucrezia's life, feeling everything with her, whereas this book flits between characters and I never connected with any of them. I was constantly at an emotional distance.

And I never quite warmed to the idea of Agnes as a witch, seer, wise woman, whatever she was.

Depictions of the Black Death always get to me, though. Ken Follett's World Without End did it best. Like a lot of historical events, I mostly view the horror of it in an abstract way, so it hits incredibly hard whenever an author takes you inside that time. The scale of the death, the swiftness of the disease... how terrifying it must have been. O'Farrell did capture some of that. And the ending was also quite good.

It's okay. I'm still going to read more by O'Farrell because I loved The Marriage Portrait so much. I'm thinking maybe I should stick to the stories and periods that I know very little about.