Every time I sell a book, I tell my buyer: "Please leave me a review on Amazon! I love hearing back from my readers!" And I mean every word of it when I say it. Amazon is the world's largest marketplace for books right now, and Amazon reviews are visible to every potential buyer out there. I read every review I get, some of them over and over. Nearly every day I look at my books' Amazon pages and see if anyone has left me a new review, and when I get one, it's like Christmas morning - scrolling through the reviews that are already there, looking for the most recent one, and seeing what my reader has to say. (Let me add - if you're going to leave a rating, please leave a short review to go with it! Don't get me wrong, I'm glad for any and all feedback, but I'd rather see WHY you gave my book five stars, or one star, or something in between rather than simply see another star rating. OK, end of digression!)
Five star reviews are wonderful for an author's ego, of course - especially when they are carefully written, thoughtful, and sincere. Every writer wants his book to be someone's favorite book - I mean, that is why we spend so much time and effort telling these stories, so that others may enjoy them. But almost as much as the reviews that say "OMG!! This is the best book EVER!", I have also learned to enjoy those long, thoughtful, mixed reviews that I get from some readers. I love hearing about what I did right in a particular story, but I also like to hear what people think I got wrong. Constructive criticism makes us better at what we do, whether we are authors, teachers, engineers, or researchers. So when I see a three or four star review left for one of my books, I read it with great interest to see how my reader thought I could have done better. If I think the criticism is unfair or nit-picky, then I will disregard it and move on. If I think it's legitimate and insightful, I'll adjust my future works accordingly to try and avoid making the same mistake again.
One thing, though - Amazon doesn't allow authors to interact with their reviewers, other than to check the "Helpful" or "Not Helpful" box after the review. I totally get that, of course - given the divisive nature of public discourse these days, they don't want to have the review section taken up with flame wars between authors and their readers. That makes a lot of sense, and I really have no desire to argue with any of my reviewers. Every now and then, though, you get a review that makes you wish you could sit down and have a conversation with the person who posted it. Such was the case with a lovely four star review I recently got for PRESIDENT HAMILTON from a woman named Georgia. She raised some interesting and valid points that I'd love to respond to, so I'm doing it here just in case she ever reads this blog.
ATTENTION: FROM HERE DOWN, THIS POST CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS FOR PRESIDENT HAMILTON! IF YOU HAVE NOT YET READ THE BOOK, THEN ORDER A COPY AND DO SO IMMEDIATELY. AFTERWARD, YOU MAY COME BACK TO FINISH THIS BLOG POST.
Ok, so while everyone else scrambles for the Amazon link, I'll continue for those of you who have already finished my book. Ms. Georgia said some very nice things about the story to start with; I will skip over them here (feel free to go to Amazon and read her full review if you want to know what her positive comments were) and get to what I thought was her most substantive criticism, which was this:
"So, now my biggest issue with the book.
I’m no expert but I thought the topic of slavery was handled pretty respectfully in some ways, and was certainly presented in an intriguing way at times; but there were problems.
The book is really idealistic as I said; Hamilton is going around mending fences with his enemies in the span of a single conversation. As such, in this universe, where Hamilton survives the duel and becomes president, it wasn’t too hard for me to believe Madison would free his slaves, as he and Hamilton are best friends again. I want to make it clear: in THIS alternate universe I found it believable enough. I don’t know how or whether this happened in the real world.
But Jefferson? That was pushing it. I know THAT didn’t happen.
The scenes with Sally Hemings are really uncomfortable to read - as they should be - but Jefferson freeing his slaves because Sally tells him Madison did that was pushing it for believability.
Also I think the fact that he marries her could be considered borderline disrespectful.
The larger problem with this is that it felt like it was downplaying the role these white men really had in this horrendous event. Even if it wasn’t intentional, it read a bit like: “Hey, remember those guys we love to hate in Act II? Well, they weren’t THAT bad when it came to slavery, see? Hamilton could’ve convinced them.”
It excuses their actions and ignores the reality, so that the author doesn’t feel bad about being connected to these white men who were horrible in this regard; using “it’s alternate history” as an excuse.
All that didn’t sit too well with me, as a white non-American, so I’m sure people of colour will find it even more problematic."
Now, she is right that I am idealistic, and I make no apology for that. Frankly, we live in such an overwhelmingly negative time, with school shootings, foreign conflicts, a society so bitterly divided that we seem on the brink of a new civil war at times, and a level of coarseness and rage in our public discourse that is painful to those who value civility. I wanted to tell an optimistic story of what might have been, in part, to escape the ugliness of the age we live in.
Jefferson and Hamilton were seemingly born to irritate each other. Each saw in the other everything they perceived to be wrong with America, and yet each was intrinsically necessary, in different ways, to the founding of our country. Reconciling the two of them was a great challenge, and I will note that, unlike the reconciliation with John Adams (which occupies a later chapter), the reconciliation with Jefferson was gradual and took a span of several years. While I know that it is popular in today's climate to label Jefferson and every other Southern slaveowner as monsters, pure and simple, the truth is always more complex than bumper stickers. Jefferson was a product of his time and the place where he was born; while in some way he was a man ahead of his time, in many other ways he was hopelessly mired in the historical context he was born into. Yet he was not devoid of moral values; he struggled with the morality of slavery even as he found himself unable to see a way through to rid the nation of it.
That brings us to the meat of Georgia's criticism, the comment about the Sally Hemings scenes. Let me be clear: I GET IT. Those were hard scenes to write, and I struggled with how to word them. The truth is this: we know nothing about the details of Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his enslaved concubine, and we know even less about Sally Hemings herself. There are a handful of contemporary allusions in the opposition press to Jefferson's "mulatto wench" (as the Federalists called her), and some oral history from the Hemings family that is some two hundred and fifty years old at this point. What we can say with certainty is that Jefferson owned an enslaved woman of mixed racial heritage named Sally Hemings, who was quite likely the half sister of his deceased wife Martha. For many years, her descendants claimed that all her children were sired by Thomas Jefferson, and in recent years, DNA testing has confirmed that claim to some extent. That's it. That's all we know. The Jefferson/Hemings affair is a tabula rosa on which the historian (or novelist) can write whatever narrative he chooses, as fits his personal philosophy and agenda.
Any sexual relationship between master and slave was by definition rape, since a slave cannot legally withhold consent. That's the universal consensus of modern society, and it is correct so far as it goes. Such activity may generate horror and disdain in a modern audience, but master-slave couplings were very widespread in the antebellum South. "The past is a foreign country," as one modern philosopher says, and there is much truth to that. Things that were commonplace 250 years ago are utterly unacceptable now, and things that are commonplace now were utterly unacceptable 250 years ago. We may (and should) detest many aspects of our history, but to judge people from that era by the social mores of today is not entirely fair. (If you want to see more of the historical record about Jefferson and Hemings, Monticello's official website contains everything we know: https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/ ).
The only person in the Jefferson/Hemings affair that we know anything at all about is Thomas Jefferson himself, and he was an incredibly complex man - brilliant, kind, and generous on the one hand; devious, hypocritical, and morally inconsistent on the other. But in reading both his own words and the words of those who know him, one thing that does come across is that Jefferson was quiet, friendly, and affable, detesting confrontation and violence in person, even if he enthusiastically supported both in the realm of theory. His political dirty work was always done through proxies, never directly. One on one, you read again and again of his ability to charm and befriend even those who opposed him politically. He and Hamilton shared dinner together often during the first year of Washington's presidency. Therefore I find it more likely that his relationship with Sally was in keeping with his other personal relationships - that he would have treated her with some decency and kindness within the horrific framework of the "peculiar institution." I even think he probably did love her, in his own selfish and entitled way. She may have even loved him back. Who knows? At this point in history, no one does.
So I wrote what I did in an effort to be true to Jefferson the person, as I understand him - but also with this consideration: I wanted to give him a shot at redemption; to leave him and the other Founding Fathers in a better place than I found them. So I let Hamilton's words eat at his conscience, and I gave Sally Hemings a key role in awakening him to the hypocrisy of his lifestyle. In the end, I chose to have Thomas Jefferson do the right thing in the context of his time: to free his slaves, and to give Sally the choice to leave him behind, or remain with him as his wife. I did this, not out of any disrespect to the sufferings of all those who labored under the lash in antebellum America, nor out of any desire to belittle their ordeal, but rather to create a timeline where even Thomas Jefferson could get a second chance, an opportunity to overcome and make right the greatest moral failing of his long and complex life. That's why I wrote the story that I did, because despite the broken and bitter world we live in, I still believe in happy endings.
