Kathy Cihlar

Try to set aside that the unnamed father in the story is William Shakespeare, and concentrate on the main character of Agnes instead. She is an odd, fiercely independent mix of healer, seer, feminist and stepdaughter/lover/wife/mother. I did not love the third-person omniscient present tense choice of narration, but I got used to it and it became less obtrusive as the story went on. The dual time frames, split between the early relationship between the unhappy wordsmith and the independent Agnes and their lives 15 years later with daughter Susannah and twins Hamnet and Judith, spin a lively tale, with some echoes of Clare Fraser of Outlander fame. No time travel here, but since you already know how this will all end, it sort of seems like it. With some nods to sorcery or weird spiritualism, young Hamnet dies of the plague while twin Judith recovers. The ghostly grief and descent into madness which are central to the play Hamlet, which concludes the novel, demonstrate how grief of a sudden death supersedes all in their lives, and lead to a bit of a reconciliation between Agnes and her absentee husband. This is really all Agnes’s story.