He was born on a Caribbean island so small you could walk across it before lunch. His parents weren't married, which meant the church school wouldn't take him. His father walked out. His mother died when he was eleven, or thirteen — nobody bothered to write down the year he was born, so nobody knows. By fourteen he was running a shipping firm's correspondence from a warehouse desk, with no money, no family, and no way off the island. He wrote his way off. One description of a hurricane, printed in the local paper, convinced the men of his island to take up a collection and send him to America. Nine years later he was leading a bayonet charge at Yorktown. Nine years after that he was building the financial machinery the United States still runs on. For readers aged 9 to 12, this is the story of Alexander Hamilton: the orphan, the soldier, the writer who could not stop writing, and the man who stood on a rock ledge above the Hudson at seven in the morning because he would not put one sentence on paper. It doesn't tidy him up. He argued against slavery and he did the paperwork of slavery. He gave his son the advice that got his son killed, and then took that same advice himself three years later. The hard parts are in here, told plainly, along with the questions historians are still arguing about.