Hamnet is a powerful, cinematic, well-written book and a profoundly human reading experience.

I found it particularly immersive thanks to its seamless multi-POV narration. I've read plenty of multi-perspective books before, but never one that handles the transitions so fluidly. It can be disorienting at times, but I genuinely believe that's part of what makes it so remarkable. You don't just follow the characters: you borrow their personalities, their fears, their way of thinking and seeing the world, which makes them feel alive and tangible.

The author has a rare gift for evoking universal emotions with relatively simple and direct language. Especially in the depiction of grief and depression: raw, heartbreaking, and deeply moving. The character's pain doesn't stay in the 17th century, but it bridges across time and space and lands directly in your heart, making you feel not only her grief, but the grief of every woman who has ever lost a child since the beginning of time.

The storytelling builds with a masterful crescendo that kept my eyes glued to the page. However, around the 80–83% mark, I noticed a sense of stagnation: the remainder of the book felt somewhat flat, almost anticlimactic, and didn’t seem to add anything significant to the story until the very end. I would have handled that ending differently: either concluding the book earlier or fast-forwarding into the future to give readers a fuller sense of closure. This left me a bit unsatisfied. For that reason alone, I can’t give it five stars.