Book Review: Hamnet, Maggie O'Farrell

 Book review of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell 

Read: 26/07 - 03/08/2024

My rating: 3 /5 stars

Book of 2024: 7

On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a sudden fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home?

Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in london.

Neither parent knows that Hamnet will not survive the week.

Hamnet is a novel inspired by the son of a famous playwright: a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, but whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays ever written. 

My Mum gave me this copy, and I haven’t underlined anything from it. I’ve seen this book all over bookstagram and booktok and of course know it’s very popular. That didn’t deter me but I just never got around to reading it. 

Now I want to reread Hamlet and watch every production and film and version of the play ever made. It is one of my favorite plays. I studied it at school and will always love the ghosty, gothic, madness it holds in itself. If the play was inspired by the way Shakespeare felt at the time, it makes total sense. The novel does touch on this. He created comedies the years after Hamnet’s death, perhaps as a coping mechanism. 

I didn't care too much about the story on Hamnet, but I do love a plotline of a woman with inexplicable abilities and senses. I love historical fiction novels, I love witchy themes, female intuition, and creativity, and I love love. I love sitting down with a good book and getting lost in the story. 

I started this on the plane to keep me occupied and keep my mind off the fact I was in a metal bird that was FLYING. It did its job of entertaining and suitably engrossing me.

I got to read this on the beach, by the pool, on the balcony at Casa Belli and it was gorgeous. The story didn’t reflect the atmosphere surrounding me, and yet I felt transported. I can envision the streets of Stratford since I visited briefly, and that helped cement the scenes in my head. 

I loved the tales of young Agnes, I loved the passion of young William, I loved the scene where Hamnet takes his sister’s place. I liked the way O’Farrell portrayed the unspoken fear and the worry and the fellowship between the children of the abusive father and helpless mother. 

I really did enjoy it. I wasn’t blown away by the writing, but then I am particular. It is dense with exposition and description and at times I felt myself getting told things I could have inferred. But overall, it was interesting, and clever, and it’s made me want to reread Hamlet so it can’t have been half bad. 

I’d recommend it if you have any interest in the 16th century, in Shakespeare, in historical fiction, in family relationships, in reading for the sake of reading.

I did fold the corner over on one page:

Hamnet, in his place of snow and ice, is lowering himself down to the ground, allowing his knees to fold under him. He is placing first one palm, then the other, on to the crisp, crystalline skin of snow, and how welcoming it feels, how right. It is not too cold, not too hard. He lies down; he presses his cheek to the softness of the snow. The whiteness of it is glaring, jarring to the eyes, so he closes them, just for a moment, just enough, so he may rest and gather his strength. He is not going to sleep, he is not. He will carry on. But he needs to rest, for a moment. He opens his eyes, to reassure himself the world is still there, and then lets them close. Just for now. (251)

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