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. They remain living presences, even models of rectitude, into the twenty-first century."
LaPlante is a first cousin, four generations removed, of Louisa May Alcott through the only daughter (Charlotte May Wilkinson) of Louisa's uncle, the abolitionist and reformer, Samuel Joseph May and his wife Lucretia Flagge Coffin May.
She also collected and edited the private papers of her great great great great-aunt Abby May Alcott, the abolitionist and suffragist who was Louisa's mother and mentor. These writings were collected and published in 2012, under the title ''My Heart Is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother'' (Free Press). LaPlante also authored a dual biography of Abba May Alcott and Louisa May Alcott entitled: ''Marmee & Louisa: The Untold Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Mother'' (Free Press, 2012).
