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So apparently being critically acclaimed and award winning still doesn’t make a good book, even when it tries this hard.

“Every life has its kernel, its hub, its epicentre, from which everything flows out, to which everything returns.��

Since this overwritten and overwrought book has not yet met an adjective or a metaphor that it didn’t like and immediately adopt (usually in neat sets of threes) to add to the neverending list of descriptors purpling its melodramatic prose, I’ll throw out a few, just to give you a taste. Overwritten, overwrought and melodramatic I already used. There are, however, still all of these: superfluous, ornate, overly lyrical, flowery, meandering, long-winded, cliche-laden, monotone, repetitive, sentimental, pretentious, and simply overdone. When one word would suffice, twelve will be used.

“The moment she has feared most, the event she has thought about, mulled over, turned this way and that, rehearsed and re-rehearsed in her mind, during the dark of sleepless nights, at moments of idleness, when she is alone.��

The prose is so purple that even Prince at the peak of his career would have stayed away from it.

“She grows up with a hidden, private flame inside her: it licks at her, warms her, warns her.��

When it comes to the meat of the story, it’s certainly a vegetarian option. See, I can do a metaphor, too!*

*(No offense meant to my vegetarian brethren. I blame the metaphor.)

In a strange and grating affectation, O’Farrell chooses to keep William Shakespeare unnamed, referring to him only as a Latin tutor, husband, father, son, but never even allowing him to have a first name. It’s not done for any big reveals as his identity would have been clear a few pages in regardless, even without all the marketing and even the title pointing right to him. If that’s a way to bring him down a peg so that his mostly unknown wife gets a spotlight, then it’s strange and offputting. You don’t give the voice to the voiceless by shutting up others. It’s just dismissive.
—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ���

“They beg her to stop, not to touch people’s hands, to hide this odd gift. No good will come of it, her father says, standing over Agnes as she crouches by the fire, no good at all. When she reaches up to take his hand, he snatches it away. She grows up feeling wrong, out of place, too dark, too tall, too unruly, too opinionated, too silent, too strange. She grows up with the awareness that she is merely tolerated, an irritant, useless, that she does not deserve love, that she will need to change herself substantially, crush herself down if she is to be married. She grows up, too, with the memory of what it meant to be properly loved, for what you are, not what you ought to be.��

This is a novel about Anne - or Agnes - Hathaway, William Shakespeare’s wife, who remained behind in Stratford-upon-Avon while her husband changed the course of English literature in London. We know she was a few years older than William, had three children, lived apart from Shakespeare for years, and was eventually bequeathed his second-best bed in the Bard’s will. This book had enough artistic license to breathe life into her �� and yet it chose to go with a cliche upon cliche. O’Farrell chooses to make Agnes a wild spirit, possible part-dryad, eccentric and in touch with nature, a healer and a herbalist, possessing almost unerring precognition. She’s special and intuitive and quirky in that force-of-nature new strong-woman feminine stereotype that does her no favors.

“She is rarely wrong. About anything. It's a gift or a curse, depending on who you ask.'

The rest of the characters remain flat and underdeveloped, existing as merely a background. Even our titular character, the unfortunate Hamnet, is barely a sketch of a boy, making it hard to care for him and his ultimate fate. Instead of character development, we blunder through bogs and thickets of excessive metaphors and descriptions* that slow down the paper-thin plot to glacial pace �� ooooh, what a pretty metaphor! Shiny! - interrupted incongruously by a chapter that, for reasons unknown, decides to chart a course of bubonic plague fleas to the shores of England �� unless the whole point was for a discerning reader to appreciatively chuckle at the presence of a merchant from Venice in that chapter. (Seriously, plague outbreaks were a common occurrence at that time. Who cares how that particular one got there? It wasn’t the first one or an unusual one. At least the chapter woke me up from snoozing over this book monotony - but still unnecessary.)

* Almost every page is like this:

“Several streets away, the owl leaves its perch, surrendering itself to a cool draught, its wings silently breasting the air, its eyes alert. To it, the town appears as a series of rooftops, with gullies of streets in between, a place to be navigated. The massed leaves of trees present themselves as it flies, the stray wisps of smoke from idle fires. It sees the progress of the fox, a man, sleeping in the doorway of a tavern, scratching at a fleabite on his shin; it sees coneys in a cage at the back of someone’s house; horses standing in a paddock near the inn; and it sees Judith, stepping into the street.��

And all that poor characterization and tired archetypes, combined with overwritten ornamental prose, put a wall between the characters and me, a reader. I just could not connect with them. It made me feel detached from them, always observing from a distance but never feeling or caring on a deeper level.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ�Ĕ���
And now it’s as good of a time as any for a quick sample of ridiculous plot points that, in this bogged down and poorly paced narrative, literally went nowhere.

- What’s the point of Agnes�� precognition and strange dryad-ish origins? I like my magical realism as much, or actually probably more, than the next person, but what was the point of incorporating this here?

‘Someone who knows everything about you, before you even know it yourself. Someone who can just look at you and divine your deepest secrets, just with a glance. Someone who can tell what you are about to say �� and what you might not �� before you say it. It is,�� he says, ‘both a joy and a curse.��

- What with the insistent hints at illegal sheep skins dealings of Shakespeare’s father and involving Agnes�� brother in shady dealings as a precondition for marriage consent that were never followed up and just petered out?

- Why all the fretting about Agnes not realizing that it’s Hamnet and not Judith who would die? It’s not like she had power to do anything about it, not that timely attention would have helped.

- Why write about that damn kestrel anyway if we never hear anything about it after the wedding? Was it fulfilling the witch’s familiar part until O’Farrell lost her interest in that storyline?

- Why switch the focus from abusive father to the jealous mother-in-law just to have all these storylines fizzle out? Also, what was the point of mentioning Hamnet having been hit by his grandfather when Judith fell ill, all the references to the cut above his eyebrow, and no payoff? I was half-waiting for the damn cut to get infected and kill him (instead of a plague).

- Why oh why were we treated to “this house is shaped like a letter “A�� eyeroll-worthy bit of dialogue???

- Why would Agnes freak out that her husband would use their dead son’s name in a play? Why see it as an offense and not a loving tribute?

- Why are those fraternal twins written as identical?

- And finally, my most burning question. What happened to all those apples that needed to be stored properly but were all disturbed during that cringeworthy barn sex scene? Did they all spoil? And if they didn’t, why was I subjected to reading about them bouncing around like there was a small earthquake from the steamy sex????

—�Ĕ�Ĕ���
The climax of this story, as you’d predict, hinges upon Shakespeare writing “Hamlet�� a few years after his son Hamnet dies. It’s right there in the book blurb, making sure we don’t fail to spot the blatant similarity in the names. And that climax was as underwhelming as one could only imagine, hinging on weak and tenuous connections and completely out-of-character observations by Agnes, and existed because it was supposed to, regardless of whether it felt organic to the story.

“He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live. She will say all this to her husband, later, after the play has ended, after the final silence has fallen, after the dead have sprung up to take their places in the line of players at the edge of the stage.��

At the beginning, I thought that its prose was an interestingly styled introduction into meandering and a bit feverish mind of Hamnet, but as the narrative plodded on, I noted more irritation, eventually sliding into impatience and finally settling into that reading curse �� a tired boredom. I no longer cared what would happen, only how long it would take me to reach the end of the book. And that comes from someone with a decent tolerance for overwriting, given my general love for Valente, Mieville or This Is How You Lose the Time War.

2 stars. Overwritten, overwrought, overhyped.

—�Ĕ�Ĕ���
Buddy read with Stephen and Allie.