📚 Book Club Chat + Review 📚
Title: Finding Margaret Fuller
Author: Allison Pataki
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Genre: Historical Fiction
Today is the long awaited day for our @bookfriendsbookclub chat + zoom of Finding Margaret Fuller by Allison Pataki. @allisonpataki We’ll see you tonight at 6pm MT!
From page one I was smitten with Margaret Fuller and the author’s poetic words. I was constantly asking myself “why haven’t I ever heard of this delightful and important woman!?”
“Why should women not be allowed to think, as men do? To learn, to ask, to speak? Are our minds any less capable? Any less worthy?”
Taking place in the mid to late 1800s, Margaret Fuller was a woman ahead of her time. She was an advocate for women, a humanitarian and the first female war correspondent. She was a muse for Ralph Waldo Emerson and had a place among the many literary greats—Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe. She even was a role model for Louisa May Alcott! It’s believed she was the inspiration for Hawthorne’s Hester Prynnie. Book nerds are going to love this book!
As she begins adulthood, she heads to Boston to be a teacher and tutor in order to provide for her mother and siblings. Along the way, she stops in Concord after accepting an invitation from Ralph Waldo Emerson. There she befriends Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and the Alcott family! Craving more than just poetry and drama she seeks out new challenges and adventures becoming the first woman permitted entry in the Harvard Library. You’re going to love her sparring with Edgar Allen Poe there! Her greatest adventure yet is when Horace Greeley offers her an assignment in Europe and she becomes a war correspondent writing for The Dial magazine. While on assignment she falls in love with Rome and a Roman count; she is fierce entering the fight for Italy’s unification. I loved this bit of history!
Heartbreak. Hope. Inspiring. Poetic. Literary. Dramatic. Love. I highly recommend this one! You are sure to fall in love with Margaret Fuller.