Hamnet

“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. There's just enough of this recollection, alive, she hopes, to enable her to recognize it if she meets it again. And if she does, she won't hesitate. She will seize it with both hands, as a means of escape, a means of survival. She won't listen to the protestations of others, their objections, their reasoning. This will be her chance, her way through the narrow hole, at the heart of the stone, and nothing will stand in her way.”

It's been a minute since I've cried this hard at a book. I will admit that it took me a minute to really get into this book, the first half dragged a bit for me but once I passed the threshold into the second half, I read the rest in one sitting. Maggie's writing just melts into your skin in ways that few authors have been able to do for me. We've learned so much about Shakespeare and talked of him so much over the years but know so little of his family so this story, though fiction, was a breath of fresh air.