The Schoolmaster's Daughter

August 15, 2011
Boston smolders on the eve of the American Revolution in Smolens’s ambitious blend of fiction, history, battlefield romance, and intrigue. Drawing from the real-life Lovell family, with loyalist Boston Latin schoolmaster John and his cipher of a son,James, on opposite sides, Smolens builds his story around Abigail, John’s daughter and James’s sister, forgotten by history but here the unsung heroine of Bunker Hill. Abigail aids the resistance by helping her brother, Benjamin, detained by the British, and her friend Rachel Revere, and soon becomes the prime suspect in a redcoat’s murder. She’s torn between her parents and siblings, and between a careless American volunteer and an attentive British officer who proves both her most intimate ally and deadliest enemy. Well-researched but overreaching, Smolens’s novel features appearances by Dr. Benjamin Church (less famous than Benedict Arnold, but equally traitorous), Paul Revere, and others. In his best passages, Smolens imagines the betrayals, espionage, and collaborations, personal and strategic alliances, and the frequent crossing of lines (not just physical) between the occupying British and the Bostonians they want to control. Abigail herself crosses lines for the cause, joining a roster of historical fiction heroines with feminist leanings toward self-determination, sexual freedom, and altering the course of history.