Narrative Nonfiction Review: The Scandalous Hamiltons

Summary: This was a dramatic story well told, but there wasn’t enough material to sustain a book.

This story of a woman who tricked Alexander Hamilton’s great-grandson into marrying her by purchasing a baby from a baby farm is almost too incredible to be true. The first 100 pages or so were full of drama straight out of a soap opera. It was fun to share the unbelievable details with my husband as I was reading. The story slowed down quite a bit after that though. The stories about the main character became less interesting. We also followed more and more tangential characters as the story progressed. It began to feel like the author was simply including any scrap of news he found that mentioned the Hamiltons.

The level of detail was generally good. I appreciate when an author has bothered to learn about the weather on a given day and visit a site, so they can give an accurate visual description of a scene. The author also seemed to have access to either pictures or physical descriptions of characters. I appreciated the inclusion of descriptions of the characters’ appearance, but I wish there had been more citations so I could know their source. There were also a few places where the details did get to be too much for me. This happened more and more as the stories themselves became less relevant to the main couple.

While there were parts of this story that were fun to read, because of the wild plot and meticulous detail, the end started to drag. I’m not sure there was enough material here for even this relatively short book. It might be worth the read if you’re into family and court room drama, but this isn’t a book I can strongly recommend.

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