Alyssa Cole is a relatively recent discovery for me, as I've only read the first Loyal League book prior to this, but she's got some good stuff coming out. A Hope Divided intrigued me as soon as I finished reading An Extraordinary Union, and she also recently put out a modern romance, A Princess in Theory, that looks wonderful as well. She has heroines who are in interesting fields--spying, medicine, science--and who are women of color, which are rare in mainstream romance and rarer still in historical romance. And while I had liked An Extraordinary Union, something about A Hope Divided just seemed like it would strike me better.And it did.
An Extraordinary Union was definitely a historical romance. A Hope Divided I would classify as a historical fiction with a strong romantic thread. The relationship between Marlie and Ewan is important to the story, yes--but equally so is the emphasis that Cole places on the non-combatant participants in the Civil War, those who didn't join up with the Confederate or Union armies, but fought in their own ways. This might have been running slaves, escaped Union prisoners, or others trying to get away through the Underground Railroad, it might have been Quakers refusing to fight, it might have been spies, it might have been farmers sending food to Union prisoners. Marlie, our heroine, is a biracial woman. Growing up with her mother in a rural area, she's not very aware of her background, until a white woman, Sarah Lynch, shows up offering to take Marlie and give her the life that she, as a Lynch, deserves. Marlie's mother agrees that's best, and off Marlie goes, against her will. Though she finds herself living a mostly-respectable life--even as a Lynch, the color of her skin and her strange heterochromatic eyes keep people aware of who she is--she also holds onto her roots, brewing medicines for those in need, though she maintains that she relies on medicine and science rather than magic, folklore, or witchcraft like people said about her mother.
Enter Ewan, the brother of An Extraordinary Union's hero. He's a Union prisoner hiding his identity, because his specialty was torturing information out of Confederate soldiers, and one of the men roaming in the area in charge of the nefarious Home Guard is one of the last men he encountered before being taken prisoner and he...somewhat lost his composure during the "interrogation." Ewan has anger problems, stemming from his childhood with a drunk and abusive father, but he's worked hard to suppress them. Torturing people, however, doesn't exactly lend itself to that. In Marlie, who he encounters when she brings food and books to the prison, he finds peace, and also attraction--not just to her body, but to her mind. But of course they can never be together...until he's holed up in a hidden room in Marlie's suite at Lynchwood, having escaped from prison.
There are some really nefarious people here, far so more than in the first book, and it's Marlie's interactions with them as well as the people in her community and those she meets when she leaves that make this a work of historical fiction with a romance bend rather than the other way around. In traditional historical romance novels, the setting is kind of wallpaper, just designed to make the characters look good. In A Hope Divided, the setting thrums with life. It lives and breathes and is a character in its own right. This sense of place contributes so much to the story and really grounds it in a strong historical fiction background instead of only romance.
Overall, I liked this more than the first book. It's less of a spy story or a romance, but I think the other aspects added in balance well and make it a stronger story overall.
4.5 stars out of 5.
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