So, because I'm British I don't really know much about the American Revolution, even though I have a history degree. The thing is, we have so-o-o much history to cover that the Revolution, although it caused political upheaval and nearly bankrupted us, and although it was a massive thing for America, is just one aspect of Colonialism, which is one of dozens of units you can choose to study at degree level.
So I Googled Alexander Hamilton and found out that he's the guy from the Broadway show and suddenly everything made a lot more sense. And then I read that Melissa de la Cruz had written Alex and Eliza because her daughter had seen the show and wanted to know more about the characters. (Although this didn't sound quite right. Because if the Broadway show had been a flop, there's no way she'd have bothered writing a book about Alexander Hamilton. No way. No matter how desperate her daughter was to hear more about him. And why didn't she just tell her daughter to Google him? No, she wanted to ride the successful coattails of the show.)
So the story was okay. Just okay. The writing was a bit clunky and veered constantly from a starchy, pseudo-historical style of narration to weirdly anachronistic. The plot didn't have much going on except for Alex and Eliza falling in love and a lot of detail about the dresses everyone wore. However, it was totally readable and really quite sweet.
Plus, I found out who Benedict Arnold was, whose name I've heard hundreds of times without ever really knowing what he was famous for.
Also, it made me Google the American Revolution and find out a bit more about it, so that was good.
I think the reason this didn't really resonate with me was that effectively it was just a fairly simple historical romance with no real bite, centered around two people named Alex and Eliza. Neither of them had achieved the great things Wikipedia tells me they went on to achieve, so they were just a bit bland. Eliza was feisty, Alex was smitten but that was about it. Usually in romances, the MCs have a few more character traits injected into them, but the author hadn't done that here. Maybe she'd relied on them being real life characters and everyone knowing what they were famous for, or the fact that there's a hugely successful Broadway production featuring them and so left the reader to fill in the blanks, but obviously for me that didn't work.
So yeah. Probably recommended for Americans or people who have seen Hamilton.
3 stars