Alex & Eliza - Melissa de la Cruz, The Hamilton Affair - Elizabeth Cobbs
So, I grabbed this book for a few reasons.
A.) The cover is gorgeous. LOOK AT IT. LOOK AT HOW BEAUTIFUL IT IS.
B.) Free preorder swag. (#KeepingThemHonest)
C.) I love everything about Hamilton: an American Musical.
D.) I wanted to learn more about Alex and Eliza's story.
E.) It's their love story in a YA format, and nothing gets me going like a campy YA Romance.
So, like. This book was a good, easy read, but it was made more dramatic than it had to be with moments where the author "filled in the gaps" with her own version of what happened.
There are a few examples I can think of, but I think the most important was that Elizabeth Schuyler was never engaged to Henry Livingston. So the whole scene at the very end was something that never happened.
De la Cruz was very liberal with what she added and remained true with. If you're just looking for something fun and easy to read, I would go with this.
If you want a more historically accurate, historical-fiction version of events, I would suggest The Hamilton Affair.
In The Hamilton Affair, Elizabeth Cobbs does her best to cite her research, discuss falsehoods in her books, and admits to her liberties that were taken with the story.
The story starts with Alexander's childhood on St. Croix, and follows all the way through to his death in 1804. It covers everything, and makes Hamilton a much more human character than we usually see him, while giving us honesty from both he and Eliza. This would be the book I recommend if you're looking for anything Hamilton related.
This book also gives us more of the characters that you know and love from the musical. We get scenes with John Laurens, Hercules Mulligan, and Marquis de Lafayette, and there's a couple of more tense scenes with Aaron Burr.
But I think what I enjoyed most of all was how Hamilton/Eliza centric this book was. They each got equal time, so you felt as though you really knew them. It was a well balanced, well paced novel that I just devoured. It took me like, two days to read and that was because I had work.
All-in-all, good reads, but for very different reasons.
My Rating:
A&E
HA
