It may be difficult to picture the bespectacled and wigged founding father as a dynamo between the sheets, but Sally Cabot's Benjamin Franklin's Bastard gives us a glimpse of a young, virile Franklin who was just as passionate about women as he was about electricity. One of these passions led to a son born out of wedlock in 1730, William Franklin.
Drawing upon the historical record--including excerpts from Franklin's letters--Cabot's debut novel relegates both Franklin men to the periphery and instead focuses on the two women responsible for William's eventual rise from "base-born brat" to the last colonial governor of New Jersey (and a Loyalist who eventually settled in Britain). There's Deborah Franklin, a "ruined" woman whom Benjamin took as his wife and who reluctantly raised her husband's bastard as her own child. And, since William's birth mother was never revealed, Cabot has created the clever and bold Anne, a character so intriguing that you miss her sorely whenever she's not present.
The true heartache and courageous gumption in this story belong to Deborah and Anne. Cabot shows her readers how cruel and limiting colonial American society could be to women, and her descriptions of the cultural mores of that time are as riveting as the stirrings of the American Revolution. Her account of the unsinkable Anne clawing her way up from a prostitute to a respectable business owner, while yearning for her lost son, is unforgettable. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend