I picked this up as a big fan of Maggie O'Farrell's book The Marriage Portrait. I liked this one but preferred the other boom better. Despite being the titular character, Hamnet isn't really the main character. Instead, the story alternates between his parents' love stoy and his twin sister Judith falling ill with the plague.

After his death, it becomes an exploration of his mother's grief

and how the iconic Shakespearean play bearing his name may have come to pass. The book is fiction, purely speculative, but I feel like Shakespeare's family is often forgotten in history, so it was intruiging to read something from their perspective.