I DNFed Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell for an essays worth of reasons. The short answer is mainly the overly flowery writing style, her pose is so purple my Kindle dripped lilac. Also her over use of metaphors, her failure to make her characters three dimensional, her tendency to pad the run time with descriptions of things we didn’t need describing, the rather blatant misanthropy of not wanting to call Shakespeare by his name: he was the father, the latin tudor, his son etc.
I didn’t get far enough, but I suspect she was going to really lean into the “No Homo” and entirely ignore the overwhelming evidence that Shakespeare was likely bisexual.