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What did you just finish?
Patriot Hearts by Barbara Hambly. A novel, as the subtitle says, about the "Founding Mothers", which in this case means Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Sally Hemings and Dolly Madison.

There's two basic approaches to doing feminist history: you can show women participating in the same high-status activities as men (being soldiers, politicians, writers, etc), or you can take low-status activities traditionally assigned to women (raising children, caring for the sick, cooking food, organizing households) and insist that these too have value. This novel definitely falls into the second category. Which I don't mean as criticism! I think both approaches have value. But this is fiction with a thesis statement, as articulated several times by the characters, that actions regarded as meaningless – being a hostess during dinner, paying morning visits, buying the right kind of china – influenced the course of events just as much as signing treaties or making speeches in Congress. Even when these historical figures did take on more "male" roles (Adams in particular had quite an active political career, which this depiction of her studiously avoids. I don't mean that Hambly was unaware of it – I'm absolutely sure she wasn't – but that wasn't the story she wanted to tell in this particular book), the focus remains on what they did in more "feminine" roles.

The story is structured around August 24, 1814, a day which Mrs. Madison (the then First Lady) spent furiously cleaning and packing up the White House before fleeing mere hours ahead of the British Army, who would burn it down that evening as part of the War of 1812. Different household doodads – a portrait, a coffeepot, a piece of jewelry, a hand-mirror – call to mind the earlier First Ladies, triggering flashbacks to their stories. This is a fairly neat premise for a novel, but it leads to a lot of jumping around in time, which makes it hard to keep track of who is doing what and why (a problem not helped by the fact that there's about 27 characters named some version of "Elizabeth" – Eliza, Lizzie, Betsy – and equally many "Johns" and "Georges"). Nonetheless, there are some incredible set-pieces that stand out vividly from the general confusion, Philadelphia's Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793 and the storming of the Bastille the same year (witnessed in this novel by Hemings, who was indeed in Paris if unlikely to have been actually roaming the streets at the right time) in particular.

I found Hemings's sections to be the most compelling of the four, though that may be simply because the relationship between her and Jefferson is inevitably more confusing and thought-provoking and thus a more gripping story than any happy marriage. It's also the most fictionalized of the four, since though Hemings might have been literate, no record of her writing survives, and Jefferson didn't mention her beyond a few straightforward listings of his slaves. Two hundred years later, of course no one has any idea of what she felt about him: did she hate him? love him? bleakly tolerate him? I like the choices Hambly made, but since all we have are guesses, other readers might prefer a different story.

Overall, I liked the book, though I'm sure there are plenty of more straightforward versions of this history out there.

As a sidenote, if you are considering reading this for Hamilton, as I did, he only actually appears on-page for about two paragraphs. He gets mentioned in discussions in addition to that, but pretty much exclusively by people who are either momentarily angry at him or outright hate him, so it's not a very kind depiction. Aaron Burr appears more often, though he's still a very minor character.

The Food of Oman: Recipes and Stories from the Gateway to Arabia by Felicia Campbell. A cookbook that I was interested in because I spent part of a year living in Oman back in 2010. When you're writing a cookbook about a place, aimed at an audience that is not from that place (this one is pretty clearly intended for Americans, or at least Westerners), there's a constant tension between "authenticity" and "adaptation". I felt like Campbell could have done a little better with the adaptation, particularly in regards to ingredients that are hard to get outside of Oman. Let's be real: I am not going to buy "thin-skinned Mexican limes" and spend a month drying them all so I can use half a tablespoon in a recipe, and I doubt anyone else is either. Also, despite the subtitle, there's not really any "stories" here, aside from an account of a dinner party or two.

I did try out two of the recipes: Tuna Kabuli (a spiced rice dish in vaguely the same family as fried rice or biryani) and Mchicha Wa Nazi (spinach creamed with coconut milk). Neither was terribly impressive, though they weren't awful, either.

On the positive side, there were a lot of nice photographs? Just in case anyone's more interested in a coffeetable book than a cookbook.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

What are you currently reading?
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage and Money in the Early Republic by Margaret A. Oppenheimer. Continuing the theme, this is a nonfiction book about one of Aaron Burr's wives. I actually requested in from NetGalley ages and ages ago – before Hamilton was a thing – but this seems like a good time to finally get around to reading it!