Fantasy Buddy Reads discussion

This is a Buddy Read for Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell starting on August 4, 2025.


Happy Reading!

Thank you!

Well shit, this is a month wait at the library. I put in for it. I’ll be here, eventually.

My book club is next Fri, so I have to read before then. :) But I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

Reading this today. About 50% through. Maybe it's just that I don't read a lot of historical fiction, but I didn't feel like I had a good grasp on what kind of story the author was trying to tell until this point... (view spoiler)[Giving us different timelines following the titular Hamnet a little, his mother a lot more, and now the progress of the plague hinted at in the opening epigraph... this isn't really about Hamnet, it's about grief, about losing Hamnet, and everything that did to the family...

There are some nice lines in the writing, but I'm not a fan of present-tense storytelling and the passive voice, so I'm a bit itchy with impatience with the story, but it's okay. (hide spoiler)]

Finished! Interesting, but definitely not my cup of tea. Content Warning for family losing a child--which should be obvious from the title and history, but (view spoiler)[I swear, an entire quarter of the book was dedicated to describing Hamnet as he died and after he died, and it was rather horrible. And kind of boring at the same time. But then, I thought Grave of the Fireflies was boring and spent most of it just wishing the sister would die already... so I obviously have no empathy there.

Or maybe it's that I already knew where this was going, as anyone who knows history does. A child dead. Kind of like reading a prequel book about a character who dies in the first book, or is dead before a series starts. Journey before destination, maybe, but when the destination is death, I often am less interested in the journey--or prequel. One of the reasons I tend to avoid Arthur retellings. The only bit I really liked here was how the author made it like Hamnet chose the death to save his sister, tricking Death with their twin-ness. That was a sweet twist. But the rest... there wasn't anything new in the story to catch my attention, or for me to do plot-guesswork on, nothing really for my mind to latch on to as a reason to continue the story.

Well, I guess it led me to the wikipedia page! So I did get curious about the real inspirations, and how much research... I knew most of it, but found I had a few misconceptions--like I knew that he'd married someone much older than him, (26 to his 18), but I'd thought she was a widow (nope). I also thought, when the conversation in the book came up about him being too young to wed, that that was inaccurate--weren't people getting married at like 12 in those days? But no, apparently mid-twenties was normal, even for women--especially women who were orphaned with younger siblings, as they might put off marriage until their younger sibs were taken care of. So I liked he historical hooks like that. (hide spoiler)]