It's clever how French pulls apart the seams of the world in Hamlet to show the largely invisible actions, motivations and relationships of women. TheIt's clever how French pulls apart the seams of the world in Hamlet to show the largely invisible actions, motivations and relationships of women. The invisibility to men is one aspect of the book, but the ways in which the women are at times invisible to themselves or each other, at other times not as invisible as they think and a kind of intergenerational class solidarity builds between the women of the castle.
The the same time French constructs and deconstructs and reconstructs again and again a romance which really irritated me (I have to say) and is the sort of thing you would expect to find in a typical Young Adult's book only....well there's more to it than the immediately obvious. But Ophelia is not asexual, she has desires and yearnings complicating her other motivations. She is strongly written, always an agent but not always free. Her female (and generally default heterosexual) desire is one of the things working against her equality to the male characters, but she is headstrong enough to navigate that intelligently (when she learns she needs to).
Did anyone else apart from me think the hint was that Horatio was gay?
I wasn't crazy about the ending. I was sort of predicting that could happen but one of the key characters introduced so late was to me very unlikeable. Still Ophelia makes the best of that situation too!
It was interesting how much of the book was taken up by descriptions of food (especially cheese) and of outfits. I like a lot of visible food in a book and a couple of times I've been told this is "women's writing" that men tend to leave it out as unimportant. In a previous life I read some feminist article about that.
Oh it's also a version of Hamlet with a lot of Shakespeare's dialogue still used.
My nit-picks are nebulous and not really worth going into. This was a masterful use of the Young Adult genre to deliver something genuinely nuanced and provocative....more
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