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| Cover image taken from Goodreads |
Alex and Eliza, by Melissa De La Cruz
Rating: 2/5
Acquisition: In-Store purchase.
Goodreads
Amazon
Oh, boy.
Guys, I really, really, REALLY wanted to love this book. I honestly THOUGHT I was going to love this book. I went into reading this thinking there couldn’t possibly be anything that could ruin this story for me.
Wrong-o.
Before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s actually talk about what this book is about, for those of you unfamiliar. Alex and Eliza is a (very heavily) fictionalized account of the romance of Alexander Hamilton (the ten-dollar Founding Father without a father himself) and Elizabeth Schuyler. Alex is a penniless orphan with a keen mind who has made himself invaluable to George Washington as his aide-de-camp in the Revolutionary War. Eliza comes from a very old, prestigious family that has fallen on hard times, so she and her sisters are being pressured into advantageous marriages, and fast.
You can see the appeal of this story for a Hamilton fan such as myself. I really adore musical!Eliza. She’s a beautiful cinnamon roll. In the musical, we don’t get to see too much courtship or wedded bliss for Alexander and Eliza, as their meeting and their wedding is covered in the course of one song (“Helpless”), and then we see Eliza missing her husband while he’s at war, missing her husband while he’s doing politics things, hating her husband when he cheats on her, and then finally, FINALLY forgiving her husband in the aftermath of their oldest son’s death. It’s an emotional roller-coaster, honestly, so I thought this book would sort of zoom in on all that time covered in “Helpless,” and be awesome and adorable.
To be honest, I think it was too adorable. There are just one too many scenes where Alex is Eliza’s knight in shining armor, and it becomes unbelievable. (Spoiler ahead.) This culminates in Alex rescuing Eliza from a sexual assault by her fiance, who was, of course, chosen by her parents. He then rides across the state in half the time it should probably take to warn her parents of the scoundrel they’re forcing their daughter to marry and stop the wedding, after which journey he collapses with a fever and is bedridden for several days due to cold and fatigue. Yeah, forgive me if I don’t believe that is how it went down. I get that this is fictionalized, but that’s a pretty major event that I feel like historians would know about. I have a little bit of a problem with a fictionalized account of a historical romance completely inventing something huge like that. Let’s stick to making up dialogue and little scenes, shall we? Please, leave the major stuff to history.
There are also major chunks of text that explain Alex’s role in the Revolutionary War that feel like they were copy-and-pasted from Wikipedia. Dry much?
The portrayal of Eliza’s sister Angelica is weird, as well. She’s described as “whip-smart” in the beginning of the book, and yet the author mentions several times that Eliza is smarter. What I think that the author meant by “whip-smart,” it seems from the characterization we see later, is shrewd and practical. So shrewd and so practical, it seems, that she’s seriously bitter and unlikeable. That saddened me, because I love Angelica so much in the musical. Of course, the author of this book is in no way obligated to base her characterization of any character off of Miranda’s, but I just don’t feel that her characterization was very fair, or even helpful to the novel.
LAST THING, and this is so petty, but this is how I knew the author didn’t really take care in this book. In the beginning of the book, the narrator states that Catherine Schuyler, Eliza’s mother, has been pregnant thirteen times to date at the time of this particular scene, and that she has buried six children, including a set of triplets. On the very next page, it says that she has seven children still alive.
…
…
…
That doesn’t add up. If one of those 13 pregnancies was triplets, and we assume that all the rest of the pregnancies were single births (they weren’t, there was a set of twins, one of whom died at birth and another that lived for less than a year, but the book doesn’t mention that specifically), there would be nine children living. My research indicates that the author had the right number of living and dead children, but had forgotten to factor the triplets into the pregnancy count. Fast forward to the end of the book, at Eliza and Alex’s wedding, where Catherine Schuyler is once again mentioned, and depicted as being pregnant for the twelfth time. At least be consistent, you know? Sloppy. I was actually going to give this book three stars just for being kind of cute, but this massive error knocked it down a whole star for me. A lesson to authors: pay attention.
The verdict: This book was a major disappointment. Never fear, though, I’m about to crack into my Uppercase book for this month, so perhaps things are about to look up for my reading life!
Until next time!
Happy reading,
Ally
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