Two very dissimilar books highlighted my reading in September. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell by far stood out. It is the fictionalized story of the short life of Shakespeare’s only son, Hamnet. Very little is actually known about the boy or how he died at age eleven. The story renders in heartbreaking and exquisitely beautiful detail the author’s depiction of Shakespeare’s early life, his parents, his marriage, his wife and three children. Told with limited omniscience, O’Farrell weaves a mesmerizing tale of the events, relationships and personalities in Shakespeare’s life before and during the plague years in Europe. In spite of the difficult subject matter, I highly recommend this novel.
The Book of Two Ways by Jodi Picoult was a
book club pick. I found this novel confusing in its format. The story skips
forward and back so often, the reader doesn’t have a clue which events happened
in which sequence.
The
Book of Two Ways is an ancient, Egyptian burial tradition which shows two ways,
by land or water, to reach heaven in the afterlife. It tells the story of a
woman who has lived two lives and is faced with choosing how to continue her
story, thus the parallel. The woman has a history as an Egyptologist who
interrupted her studies due to circumstances beyond her control. She never
returned to Egypt and became a death doula.
For
students of Egyptology as well as Quantum Physics the novel covers these topics
fairly extensively and is interesting information. There are simultaneously two
quite lovely love stories interwoven that make up part of the choice that must
be made.
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