Hamnet | Maggie O'Farrell

    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 is 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. (49-50)

Over the next while, she observes him carefully, in the manner of a doctor watching a patient.  She sees how he cannot sleep at night but then cannot rouse himself in the morning. How he rises at midday, groggy, whey-faced, his mood flat and grey.  The smell of him is worse then, the sour, rank scent soaked into his clothing, his hair.  His father comes to the door, shouting and bawling, telling him to stir himself, to put in a day's work.  She sees how she, Agnes, must remain calm, steady, must make herself bigger, in a way, to keep the house on an even keel, not to allow it to be taken over by this darkness, to square up to it, to shield Susanna from it, to seal off her own cracks, not to let it in. (158)

Agnes lifts her chin a little higher. There is no disgrace, says the straightness of her back.  There is no problem in our marriage, says the proud, outward curve of her middle.  There is no failing in the business, say her husband's shining boots. (176)

She presses the muscle, presses and presses, as if she might draw juice from it.  She senses mostly noise, at first: numerous voices, calling in loud and soft and threatening and entreating tones.  His mind is crammed with a cacophony, with strife, with overlapping speech and cries and yells and yelps and whispers, and she doesn't know how he stands it, and there are the other women, she can feel them, their loosened hair, their sweat-marked handprints, and it sickens her but she keeps holding on, despite wanting to let go, to push him away, and there is also fear, a great deal of fear, of a journey, something about water, perhaps a sea, a desire to seek a faraway horizon, to stretch his eyes to it, and beneath all this, behind it all, she finds something, a gap, a vacancy, an abyss, which is dark and whistling with emptiness, and at the bottom of it she finds something she has never felt before: his heart, that great, scarlet muscle, banging away, frantic and urgent in its constancy, inside his chest.  It feels so close, so present, it's almost as if she could reach out and touch it.
He is still looking at her when she releases her grip. Her hand nestles, inactive, inside his.
"What did you find?" he says to her. 
"Nothing," she replies. "Your heart."
"That's nothing?" He says, pretending to be outraged.  "Nothing? How could you say such a thing?"
She smiles at him, a faint smile, but he snatches her hand to his chest.

"And it's your heart," he says, " not mine."
(265)

I am dead:

Thou livest;

... draw thy breath in pan,

To tell my story

--Hamlet, Act V, scene ii

(215)

***

5/5. I'm in awe that anyone could write something so stunning and tragic. One of my top 5 favorite books. I promised no spoilers on this blog, so I won't say more. But WOW, wow wow.

If you've read this book-- did you feel the same? Let's chat!

Before We Were Yours | Lisa Wingate

[1] "She is pretty. A gentle, fragile soul.  Not the sort who would intentionally bring about the catastrophic unraveling that is only, this moment, beginning.  In my multifold years of life, I have learned that most people get along as best they can.  They don't intend to hurt anyone.  It is merely a terrible by-product of surviving." (3)

[2] "Life is not unlike cinema.  Each scene has its own music, and the music is created for the scene, woven to it in ways we do not understand.  No matter how much we may love the melody of a bygone day or imagine the song of a future one, we must dance within the music of today, or we will always be out of step, stumbling around in something that doesn't suit the moment.  I let go of the river's song and found the music of that big house.  I found room for a new life, a new mother who cared for me, and a new father who patiently taught me not only how to play music, but how to trust.  He was as good a man as ever I've known.  Oh, it was never like the Arcadia, but it was a good life.  We were loved and cherished and protected." (315) 

[3] "I lose myself in the smell of woodsmoke and morning fog so thick it cloaks the opposite bank and turns the river into a sea.  I run along the sandbars with my sisters, and hide in the grass, and wait for them to come find me.  Their voices weave soft through the mist, so that I can't tell how close or far they are. 

    On the Arcadia, Queenie sings a song.  I sit stone still in the grass and listen to my mama's voice.

            When the blackbird in the spring,

             On the willow tree,

             Sat and rocked, I heard him sing,

             Singing, Aura Lee,

             Aura Lee, Aura Lee,

             Maid with golden hair,

             Sunshine came along with thee..." (181)

[4] "A woman's past need not predict her future.  She can dance to new music if she chooses.  Her own music. To hear the tune, she must only stop talking.  To herself, I mean.  We're always trying to persuade ourselves of things." (317)

[5] "For the hundreds who vanished and for the thousands who didn't.  

    May your stories not be forgotten.

For those who help today's orphans find forever homes. 

May you always know the value 

of your work

and your love." (1) 

4.5/5. Lisa Wingate has bravely created an absolute masterpiece. Her writing is important. Her writing is poetic, and the past and present are weaved masterfully into this tapestry of heart-wrenching historical fiction. I couldn't put it down. What Georgia Tann did makes me physically ill, and is not for the faint of heart.  I wept.  The characters seemed so real they could have been breathing right off the page.  For something so horrific that there really are no words, Lisa Wingate found a way to put it into just that. And somehow she left me feeling hopeful, that we can learn from our past and make sure not to allow history to repeat itself.  For that I am so grateful.

Take note, the subject matter is for mature readers only.