Once again, we're held back by Goodreads's inability to give half-star reviews. (My real rating would be like 3.5 or 3.75.)

I wanted so desperately to love this book, and I did really enjoy swaths of it. I'm more than willing to admit that me not loving it 100% is on me, not the book itself--it does a good job with what it's supposed to do. My favorite parts are where she reflects more on what the history says about the ~American spirit~; I'm already secretly constructing a syllabus for American studies in my head that involves reading this book, so that I suppose is very high praise.

I think one thing that I struggled with is how inundated I've been recently with books about the Revolutionary Era. Again, this is not Sarah Vowell's fault--I can only hope that her sales have been boosted because of the recent Hamilton musical. The informational parts were nothing ground-breaking, not that I think they should be, but coming off of just having pretty recently finished the Chernow Hamilton biography and all of its details about battles and what the Gay Trio were doing in them, I wasn't as interested as I might otherwise have been.

I was very grateful to see a bibliography in the back (because I'm a huge nerd), and I want to go back to her other books now to see if they also have bibliographies.

Overall I'd say it's a solid book, just not my cup of tea at this exact moment in my life!