![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
reading wednesday
Jan. 9th, 2019 08:55 pmIt's only barely Thursday, so hopefully this still counts. The last book of 2018 and the first of 2019.
The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar. I wanted to love this one, and I. . .suppose I liked it. I saw it compared to The Essex Serpent a lot, which I would agree with, up to and including the fact that my feelings about it ran very hot-and-cold--parts of it I loved, parts of it were extremely dull to me. Its two primary characters are Angelica Neal, a kept woman whose benefactor has just died, and Jonah Hancock, a merchant who receives, instead of the shipment of goods he expects, a withered mummy of a mermaid his captain has procured for him at great price. Jonah could have been an interesting character in all his staid tradition, but never quite made it; Angelica could've been wonderful and mostly I only found her annoying. (Which is something I don't enjoy, and try to avoid, saying about female characters--I do think the character type she inhabits could be wonderful, and, again, she was very nearly there.) The most interesting characters in the book--Polly, a mixed-race girl under the care (dubiously defined) of Angelica's former madam, her friend also under the madam's care, and Simeon, the black footman who works for the madam--were given all too little time, and little to no resolution of their storylines; I would've happily read the novel Gowar seemed to want to write about them.
All of which makes it sound like I disliked it, but I'm not sure that's true--it had many virtues, including lots of absolutely wonderful historical detail that I ate up with a spoon. There were parts of it I enjoyed intensely. But overall, it felt very almost--it was almost significantly better than I thought it ended up being.
Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton, by Tilar J. Mazzeo. Oh, this book. I'm thrilled that someone wrote a biography of Eliza; I just wish it hadn't been this biography. My first criticism should be obvious after reading the title, though that may have very well been publisher-mandated. But this book has the foundational flaw that it can't seem to decide whether it's fact or fiction: it provides plenty of direct quotes from letters and the kind of factual information you would expect from a biography, but mixes this frequently with a brand of editorializing that goes well beyond the kind of interpretation that is a biographer's stock in trade; Mazzeo apparently has no compunctions about stating as fact emotions and actions which we have no way of knowing anything about. This unsurprisingly becomes grating, and significantly dilutes the power of what is otherwise a fairly solid collection of information on Eliza's life.
Despite that, it was a fast and enjoyable enough read (though much of my enjoyment came from my general obsession with these people, so ymmv). Mazzeo presents a theory that Hamilton and Maria Reynolds never had an affair, but that the whole story was a cover-up for some shady financial business of Hamilton's (which was, incidentally, the prevailing theory at the time); I'm not wholly convinced (though to be fair I'm convinced of little surrounding that whole episode), but it's an interesting theory and Mazzeo provides intriguing justification for it. She also combats the idea that the Hamiltons for certain, 100% never owned slaves, which I appreciate, though she never actually discusses this at length or backs it up with any of the available evidence.
In general it just felt very slight; partly that was the fault of the fictionalization, partly the fault of the very real lack of evidence about Eliza's thoughts and emotions; partly, it was the fault of Mazzeo's structural choices, most glaringly in relegating Eliza's life post-Alexander to the last 54 pages of a 289-page biography. Clearly to get it out this fast Mazzeo must have worked around the clock, and I'm willing to forgive the occasional slight error (though will correct them in the margins, as I'm, well, me); what I'm less willing to forgive are basic underlying structural and content choices that make this a lesser book that it could and should have been.
The Mermaid & Mrs. Hancock, by Imogen Hermes Gowar. I wanted to love this one, and I. . .suppose I liked it. I saw it compared to The Essex Serpent a lot, which I would agree with, up to and including the fact that my feelings about it ran very hot-and-cold--parts of it I loved, parts of it were extremely dull to me. Its two primary characters are Angelica Neal, a kept woman whose benefactor has just died, and Jonah Hancock, a merchant who receives, instead of the shipment of goods he expects, a withered mummy of a mermaid his captain has procured for him at great price. Jonah could have been an interesting character in all his staid tradition, but never quite made it; Angelica could've been wonderful and mostly I only found her annoying. (Which is something I don't enjoy, and try to avoid, saying about female characters--I do think the character type she inhabits could be wonderful, and, again, she was very nearly there.) The most interesting characters in the book--Polly, a mixed-race girl under the care (dubiously defined) of Angelica's former madam, her friend also under the madam's care, and Simeon, the black footman who works for the madam--were given all too little time, and little to no resolution of their storylines; I would've happily read the novel Gowar seemed to want to write about them.
All of which makes it sound like I disliked it, but I'm not sure that's true--it had many virtues, including lots of absolutely wonderful historical detail that I ate up with a spoon. There were parts of it I enjoyed intensely. But overall, it felt very almost--it was almost significantly better than I thought it ended up being.
Eliza Hamilton: The Extraordinary Life and Times of the Wife of Alexander Hamilton, by Tilar J. Mazzeo. Oh, this book. I'm thrilled that someone wrote a biography of Eliza; I just wish it hadn't been this biography. My first criticism should be obvious after reading the title, though that may have very well been publisher-mandated. But this book has the foundational flaw that it can't seem to decide whether it's fact or fiction: it provides plenty of direct quotes from letters and the kind of factual information you would expect from a biography, but mixes this frequently with a brand of editorializing that goes well beyond the kind of interpretation that is a biographer's stock in trade; Mazzeo apparently has no compunctions about stating as fact emotions and actions which we have no way of knowing anything about. This unsurprisingly becomes grating, and significantly dilutes the power of what is otherwise a fairly solid collection of information on Eliza's life.
Despite that, it was a fast and enjoyable enough read (though much of my enjoyment came from my general obsession with these people, so ymmv). Mazzeo presents a theory that Hamilton and Maria Reynolds never had an affair, but that the whole story was a cover-up for some shady financial business of Hamilton's (which was, incidentally, the prevailing theory at the time); I'm not wholly convinced (though to be fair I'm convinced of little surrounding that whole episode), but it's an interesting theory and Mazzeo provides intriguing justification for it. She also combats the idea that the Hamiltons for certain, 100% never owned slaves, which I appreciate, though she never actually discusses this at length or backs it up with any of the available evidence.
In general it just felt very slight; partly that was the fault of the fictionalization, partly the fault of the very real lack of evidence about Eliza's thoughts and emotions; partly, it was the fault of Mazzeo's structural choices, most glaringly in relegating Eliza's life post-Alexander to the last 54 pages of a 289-page biography. Clearly to get it out this fast Mazzeo must have worked around the clock, and I'm willing to forgive the occasional slight error (though will correct them in the margins, as I'm, well, me); what I'm less willing to forgive are basic underlying structural and content choices that make this a lesser book that it could and should have been.
