'Hamilton and Peggy': A Revolutionary Friendship’ by L.M. Elliott (Book Review)

And Peggy has the spotlight in Hamilton and Peggy: A Revolutionary Friendship

Hamilton and Peggy is about historical figures; the main character is Margarita “Peggy” Schuyler, the third of the older daughters of General Philip Schuyler (one of George Washington’s aides), now the star in her own novel. Peggy has always been in the shadows of her older sisters, and now the clever woman will use her talents to help the war efforts. The story is based on letters, journals and the events that happened.

Hamilton and Peggy: A Revolutionary Friendship is a necessary read for any fan of the musical Hamilton or anyone who loves a historical fiction.

L.M. Elliott about was a journalist for twenty years and then moved onto writing historical fiction novels. Hamilton and Peggy: A Revolutionary Friendship is her ninth novel and was released by Harper Collins in February 2018.

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The first thing that I love about this book is the premise of the novel as a whole; telling Peggy’s story and giving her the chance in the spotlight that she very much deserves. The character is known in Hamilton, the musical by Lin Manuel Miranda, as simply “And Peggy” now gets the story of the events surrounding the War for Independence told from her perspective. Telling a story of someone that was so helpful to the war effort, because she assisted her father in writing some of the letters corresponding with the generals on the front lines, was the kind of tale that I wanted to read — I wanted to learn more about who Peggy was as a person.

The second aspect that I love about this book is the extraordinary characters. They were real people, and the book was based on factual events, which brought the history of that time to life for me. Sometimes you find a historical fiction, and the protagonist in the book reads more like a character that the author created, and not the way that the person would actually behave. In this book, because of the nine pages of bibliography in the back of the novel, you can tell how much research went into this project to make the characters seem authentic and alive.

A final thing that I admired about this book was the actual writing and the way that this story developed. In historical fiction, you may find a bland, boring or mundane way of relating the facts, just dropping in the history as it was with no real color or character. In this novel, Elliott paints a vivid picture of what happened from 1777 to 1781 with such detail and larger than life personalities that the reader wants more. The history and facts were in this book, but it was written in a way that had a fantastic flow; at times I had to remember that I was reading a fictional account about events that occurred in another century because I was so engrossed in the way that the story unfolded.

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