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Nov. 15th, 2017 11:11 pmIt was extremely helpful of Rose Lerner, Courtney Milan and Alyssa Cole to jump on a pop culture zeitgeist and put out a trio of novellas right before a month in which I had a bunch of work travel and was looking for non-stressful reads; I read most of Hamilton's Battalion on a flight back from DC and it was great.
The novellas are linked together by a frame story about Eliza Hamilton's quest to Gather Reminiscences About Her Husband, although Hamilton himself actually takes up the absolute minimum amount of pages required to slap his name on the cover.
"Promised Land" by Rose Lerner features:
- a cross-dressing Jewish officer in the Revolutionary Army
- who takes her love interest prisoner when she catches him spying
- who is her EX-HUSBAND whom she FAKED HER OWN DEATH AND RAN AWAY FROM several years prior
- and then they have numerous arguments about their different relationships with Judaism and Jewish identity in colonial America while she's leading military operations and he's chained to a wall!
Rose Lerner, you didn't have to target your romance novella quite so directly to my interests. I'm super not complaining, I am A-OK being an extremely pandered-to target audience, I'm just saying it wasn't strictly necessary!
"The Pursuit of..." by Courtney Milan is about a black American soldier and a British officer who attempt to kill each other at the battle of Yorktown and then go on a ROM-COM ROAD TRIP. Their first conversation features the British officer self-deprecatingly joking about imperialism, which tells you that a.) Courtney Milan is real interested in poking at the inherent contradictions of a war For Freedom And Ideals fought between a colonial power and a slave-owning proto-nation, and b.) she is giving even fewer fucks about strict historical accuracy than usual. She is also very interested in jokes about cheese. I found this overall quite enjoyable although I was occasionally jarred by anachronisms in dialogue and by concern for the digestive health of our protagonists as they steadily ate their way through terrible un-refrigerated cheese.
"That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole is about black lesbians -- one of them Eliza Hamilton's secretary who has Sworn Off Love, the other a flirtatious local dressmaker who would like to convince her to reverse that decision. It's cute and features several elements I like, including epistolary romance and a community theater production, but I wish the story did not drive the back half of its plot with a Big Misunderstanding.
The novellas are linked together by a frame story about Eliza Hamilton's quest to Gather Reminiscences About Her Husband, although Hamilton himself actually takes up the absolute minimum amount of pages required to slap his name on the cover.
"Promised Land" by Rose Lerner features:
- a cross-dressing Jewish officer in the Revolutionary Army
- who takes her love interest prisoner when she catches him spying
- who is her EX-HUSBAND whom she FAKED HER OWN DEATH AND RAN AWAY FROM several years prior
- and then they have numerous arguments about their different relationships with Judaism and Jewish identity in colonial America while she's leading military operations and he's chained to a wall!
Rose Lerner, you didn't have to target your romance novella quite so directly to my interests. I'm super not complaining, I am A-OK being an extremely pandered-to target audience, I'm just saying it wasn't strictly necessary!
"The Pursuit of..." by Courtney Milan is about a black American soldier and a British officer who attempt to kill each other at the battle of Yorktown and then go on a ROM-COM ROAD TRIP. Their first conversation features the British officer self-deprecatingly joking about imperialism, which tells you that a.) Courtney Milan is real interested in poking at the inherent contradictions of a war For Freedom And Ideals fought between a colonial power and a slave-owning proto-nation, and b.) she is giving even fewer fucks about strict historical accuracy than usual. She is also very interested in jokes about cheese. I found this overall quite enjoyable although I was occasionally jarred by anachronisms in dialogue and by concern for the digestive health of our protagonists as they steadily ate their way through terrible un-refrigerated cheese.
"That Could Be Enough" by Alyssa Cole is about black lesbians -- one of them Eliza Hamilton's secretary who has Sworn Off Love, the other a flirtatious local dressmaker who would like to convince her to reverse that decision. It's cute and features several elements I like, including epistolary romance and a community theater production, but I wish the story did not drive the back half of its plot with a Big Misunderstanding.
