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A review by anjumstar
The Hamilton Affair by Elizabeth Cobbs
2.0
I'm not sure who this book for. It's obviously targeted at people who like Hamilton (suckers like me, apparently), with the gold and black color story on the cover, bringing you instantly to the Hamilton playbill and CD art. It couldn't be more obvious. However, I'm not sure what that target audience could have to gain from this story.
I see a spectrum of historical retellings at play here. On one end, you have nonfiction, like the Ron Chernow biography. On the other hand, you have Hamilton, which is historical fiction with a number of deviations, plus it's highly stylized, so in a lot of ways, it's about as far from the source material as you can go while still seeing the resemblance to the source material. The Hamilton Affair is right in the middle, so it struggles to offer anything new that the audience on either side could really desire.
What it offers is a different style from either Hamilton or nonfiction. Where nonfiction tells you what happens, it won't give you any more voice in the time period than those of letters and quotes. This book has the heightened, stilted language of the time, and that is the unique style it offers different from our two ends of the spectrum. If someone is a big fan of historical fiction, then they might like this book because of that style. However, that's not the group that this book is marketing itself to.
I read the Chernow biography a number of years ago. And as someone who does not love historical fiction (I know, definitely my bad for reading this book, lol, but I'm always trying to expand my genres!) the different style wasn't enough to win my affection for this story. It didn't have real tension, since anyone who reads this book will know that Hamilton has the affair--if it's not given away by the show, I suppose it is by the title--so we're just kind of waiting a really long time to see how long it'll take to get there. The book was slow and left me lost. I'll definitely be reading some positive reviews to see what it offered to other people, because I'm just not sure.
Also, while the writing was decent in this book, definitely had good moments, its use of epithets absolutely astonished me. I never see unnecessary epithet usage in published books--where I see it alllll the time is in *fanfiction*. And don't get me wrong, I love fanfic, but hate its use of epithets. But it's quite interesting because this book, in a very real way, *is* fanfiction. And so i wonder about Cobbs' background. Perhaps she's one of us.
I see a spectrum of historical retellings at play here. On one end, you have nonfiction, like the Ron Chernow biography. On the other hand, you have Hamilton, which is historical fiction with a number of deviations, plus it's highly stylized, so in a lot of ways, it's about as far from the source material as you can go while still seeing the resemblance to the source material. The Hamilton Affair is right in the middle, so it struggles to offer anything new that the audience on either side could really desire.
What it offers is a different style from either Hamilton or nonfiction. Where nonfiction tells you what happens, it won't give you any more voice in the time period than those of letters and quotes. This book has the heightened, stilted language of the time, and that is the unique style it offers different from our two ends of the spectrum. If someone is a big fan of historical fiction, then they might like this book because of that style. However, that's not the group that this book is marketing itself to.
I read the Chernow biography a number of years ago. And as someone who does not love historical fiction (I know, definitely my bad for reading this book, lol, but I'm always trying to expand my genres!) the different style wasn't enough to win my affection for this story. It didn't have real tension, since anyone who reads this book will know that Hamilton has the affair--if it's not given away by the show, I suppose it is by the title--so we're just kind of waiting a really long time to see how long it'll take to get there. The book was slow and left me lost. I'll definitely be reading some positive reviews to see what it offered to other people, because I'm just not sure.
Also, while the writing was decent in this book, definitely had good moments, its use of epithets absolutely astonished me. I never see unnecessary epithet usage in published books--where I see it alllll the time is in *fanfiction*. And don't get me wrong, I love fanfic, but hate its use of epithets. But it's quite interesting because this book, in a very real way, *is* fanfiction. And so i wonder about Cobbs' background. Perhaps she's one of us.