LaPlante's ancestor biographies have been “praised as reminiscent of a more celebratory Nathaniel Hawthorne", according to the Boston Book Festival.
In the anthology Boston, which includes the preface to American Jezebel, Shaun O'Connell wrote: "Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne dug into the dark history of his ancestry, which reached back both to the original Boston settlement of the 1630s and the Salem Witch Trials of the 1690s, so too did LaPlante trace family members who were rooted in the same eras... Hawthorne took shame upon himself for the misdeeds of his Puritan ancestors, and LaPlante offers praise for her forebears who testified against Puritan repression.
As her prefaces to these biographies, a kind of spiritual autobiography, show, Anne Hutchinson and Samuel Sewall were not the dark Puritans many imagined them to be.
Her reviews include: Marmee and Lousia "Abigail May Alcott is at the center of Marmee & Louisa ... 'Marmee,' as her daughters called her, was a fine writer, an indefatigable reformer, a devoted teacher — and, above all, Louisa's literary lodestar ... [After] the wildly popular Little Women...Bronson was in clover.
LaPlante has edited and lightly annotated a rich selection of letters, journal entries, and sketches that demonstrate, in Abigail's own words, the spirited, complicated, visionary woman she was.