On books 5: Hamilton's Battalion Part 2: The Pursuit Of... (Spoilers)

This is part 2 of my review of Hamilton's Battalion, which I was given an ARC of by Rose Lerner, the author of the first story in the book.

I don't feel like I have as much to say about the second story, Courtney Milan's The Pursuit Of..., because this time it's not my identity at stake. But I can say that, once you've caught your breath after reading Promised Land, you should absolutely dive on into this one.


The Pursuit Of... begins with John Hunter, a free black American soldier who fights to protect his family despite rightfully hating the slave-owning Founding Fathers, deciding not to kill Henry Latham, a British soldier who can't shut up and who's sneaked out of Yorktown to avoid his big mouth questioning orders. It evolves into a buddy comedy about travel, or what a buddy comedy would be if the protagonists were ever allowed to talk about their feelings with regard to food, racism, or each other. And it ends up as a wonderfully sweet romance in which a jaded black man and a neuroatypical white man learn to believe in each other, and by extension themselves.

The story is incredibly quotable; I kept sending Henry's babbling and John's wry observations to my boyfriend (who has ADHD, so I empathized with John's gradual warming up to both babbling and babbler). Henry's reaction to being told for the first time that people like listening to him struck a chord with my own neuroatypicality, so maybe this story isn't as far from my own experience as I'd thought. And I certainly envy John and Henry their eventual happy ending, but I'm gonna try to not make all my book reviews about my uncertainty about my own future.

And then there's the cheese. There's gotta be a whole essay in how the Cheese of Death is a metaphor for John and Henry's relationship, or their respective journeys to self-actualization, or something, and how after John discovers that the freedmen's community where he's reunited with his family has goats, he starts trying to recreate the cheese but never quite succeeds. (Hint: the secret ingredient is probably love.)

Anyway, it's sweet, it's funny, it's deep, and you should read it.