Finding Margaret Fuller
2024
You know I love Allison Pataki’s books, especially 2020’s The Queen’s Fortune: A Novel of Desiree, Napoleon, and the Dynasty That Outlasted the Empire. And how could I not be a fan of that novel? The Queen’s Fortune reimagines the life of Désirée, the Queen of Sweden who also happens to be the mother of Oscar, the handsome prince my upcoming novel’s heroine, Jacquette, falls for.
But it’s Allison’s latest historical fiction release, Finding Margaret Fuller, that has me staying up nights.
I’m just going to admit it—I had never heard of Margaret Fuller when I picked up this book. But my book club selected it, and I was hooked when Nathaniel Hawthorne appeared in the first sentences. I had read Laurie Lico Albanese’s Hester, which fictionalizes Hawthorne’s inspiration for the character of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, and I loved it. Hawthorne, I must admit, is now one of my favorite early-19th century sex symbols. Next to Oscar, of course.
But I digress.
You must read Finding Margaret Fuller, even if you already knew that Concord, Massachusetts was like an 1830s version of The Breakfast Club. I’m not kidding, it was. And Margaret Fuller, the author, journalist, advocate for women’s rights, salonist-extraordinaire, was its brightest star, outshining her illustrious posse—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, my beloved Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott, and others.
And, as usual, Pataki does a masterful job, even taking a story revealed in the first pages to be tragic and turning it into a testament of the power of hope.
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