Award categories built to spark arguments (in a good way).
Most Likely to Diagnose You by Holding Your Hand and Then Never Explain the Whole Vision
Winner: Agnes
She takes the tutor's hand and sees a landscape, a gift, and something darker she does not fully unpack — then marries the vision anyway.
Close second: Bartholomew
Do you agree, or is Bartholomew's wordless reading of Agnes even more unnerving?
Most Likely to Train a Kestrel and Treat That as a Perfectly Ordinary Afternoon
Winner: Agnes
A priest taught her; she keeps a gauntlet; the bird becomes two creatures, hooded and then suddenly itself in the air. Town calls it witchcraft. She calls it Tuesday.
Close second: Hamnet
Would you have picked Hamnet, who looks at her the way the bird does — as if returning were the whole point?
Most Likely to Give Birth in a Forest on Purpose and Leave a Riddle Instead of a Note
Winner: Agnes
After dreaming her mother's line about dense branches, she walks out with a basket and scratches the words for a husband who cannot decode them.
Close second: Mary
Is Mary the close second because she would never do this — or because trying to stop it is its own kind of drama?
Most Likely to Write a Letter About Work That Accidentally Sounds Like Falling in Love With Another Life
Winner: The husband
The gloves-for-the-players letter is supposed to be news. Agnes hears the eagerness and understands he has crossed a threshold she cannot follow.
Close second: Eliza
Or would you give this to Eliza, who actually puts the family's worst news into ink and sends it down the road to London?
Most Likely to Swap Places With Someone They Love and Call It the Only Possible Choice
Winner: Hamnet
He puts on Judith's clothes, lies down beside her, and tries to trick Death into taking the wrong twin. The rest of the book is adults trying to do a weaker version of the same trick.
Close second: The husband
Does the Ghost in Hamlet count as the same bargain — or is that comparison too generous to a man who was not in the room?
Most Likely to Make Home Feel Like a Trap You Have to Leave to Breathe
Winner: John
The glove workshop, the debts, the violence, the son parked at a farmhouse as payment: Stratford, for the husband, is first of all his father's house.
Close second: The husband
Is the husband the close second because he recreates the absence John taught him — just in a nicer register?
Most Likely to Block the Door in the Name of Love
Winner: Mary
She posts Gilbert in the street so Agnes cannot disappear into the trees for the twins' birth. Protection and captivity share a doorway.
Close second: Joan
Would you have given this to Joan, who treats Agnes's pregnancy as a problem to be managed off her farm?
Most Likely to Understand Agnes Without Needing a Single Complete Sentence
Winner: Bartholomew
The rain-and-branches note is nonsense to the husband and a map to the brother. He walks into the forest as if the trees had sent for him.
Close second: Hamnet
Does Hamnet belong here too — the child who always knows where his mother is until the one day he doesn't?
Most Likely to Be Overlooked Because They Lived
Winner: Judith
The book is named for the twin who dies. Judith has to get dressed in the morning anyway, in a house rearranged around a missing half.
Close second: Susanna
Or is Susanna the one we skip — the eldest, useful, not a twin, expected to cope?
Most Likely to Turn a Box of Glass Beads Into a World-Historical Accident
Winner: Judith
The novel traces plague from a monkey, a ship, a cat, and rags stuffed in a Venetian crate — then lets an ordinary child in Stratford open the package.
Close second: The husband
Would you blame the trading routes his London life belongs to more than the child who lifted the lid?
Most Likely to Be Called Witchy for Doing Women's Work Extremely Well
Winner: Agnes
Herbs, births, futures, a bird on a glove: the town needs her tinctures and still side-eyes the woman who makes them.
Close second: Mary
Is Mary's domestic command the respectable version of the same power — or the thing that refuses Agnes's version?
Most Likely to Use Someone Else's Child as Payment for a Bad Deal
Winner: John
The Latin lessons at Hewlands exist because John's debts parked his son there. The marriage later helps the ledger too.
Close second: Joan
Is Joan worse — trying to push a pregnant stepdaughter out of a house that is no longer hers to rule?
Most Likely to Carry a Whole Household While Being Slightly Invisible in It
Winner: Susanna
Born in the forest, raised as the sensible eldest, sent to fetch help on the fever day: she is in every room and named in fewer arguments than the twins.
Close second: Eliza
Or Eliza — the sister who writes the letter, keeps the brother's confidence, and never gets a play named after her?
Most Likely to Make You Furious and Then Ruin You in a Single Theatrical Gesture
Winner: The husband
He leaves after the burial, stays gone, then puts on plaster and plays a dead father so a boy with his son's name can live for five acts.
Close second: Agnes
Some people are angrier at Agnes for sending him to London in the first place. Are they wrong?
Most Likely to Have Two Plausible Winners and Start an Argument Before Dessert
Winner: The husband
Every category that looks like Agnes's — vision, sacrifice, leaving, love — has a shadow version with his name on it. That is the marriage.
Close second: Agnes
If you had to give this whole list to one person, who actually runs the book: the healer or the playwright?
