Hamilton's Battalion

A trio of romance novellas by Rose Lerner (who appears multiple times on my to-read list but I haven't actually read), Alyssa Cole (ditto), and Courtney Milan (I will read anything she writes and in fact have read pretty much everything she's ever written, except the new book which I'm saving for really needing it). The conceit here is that Eliza Hamilton is collecting stories from everyone whose life intersected Hamilton's somehow; two of the novellas are about soldiers during the war, and the third is about Eliza's maid-slash-research-assistant. Good stuff - the Lerner story is a m/f Jewish couple, the Milan story is an m/m couple, one Black American and one white British, and the Cole story is an f/f couple, both Black, so, very much felt like the Hamilton spirit to me of centering people of color/minorities in the American narrative. And also, I don't actually read a lot of queer historical romance, despite putting a lot of it on my to-read list, but that is clearly a mistake because romance is just so good. Also I thought there was an interesting thing here in both gay pairings where the HEA involved a business partnership and I'm totally intrigued by the substitution of financial/labor "marriage" for institutional marriage as the romantic narrative closure in historical settings, I want to read a bunch more queer romances and see whether that's a common pattern.