A Hope Divided - Alyssa Cole (Loyal League #2)

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.

An Extraordinary Union - Alyssa Cole (Loyal League #1)

Rushing to finish my reading challenges by the end of the year means more weekend book reviews!  Oh boy.  After several attempts at fulfilling the category for a Civil War or Reconstruction romance for the Unapologetic Romance Readers' challenge, I stumbled upon An Extraordinary Union, which had high reviews, the right setting, and an interracial romance.  I don't end up reading a lot of interracial romances because I heavily favor historical romances, primarily Regency-era ones set in London society, which was not exactly brimming with interracial couples, but I'm not at all opposed to them as a concept, so this was a pleasant discovery.  (I do have to read an interracial romance for another category and have a different book picked out for it; I just had too much trouble finding a good Civil War romance to slot this one into another category.)

The story here follows Elle(n) Burns, a free woman of color who was born a slave before being freed with her family as a child.  Now, Elle has returned to the South to spy for the Loyalty League, a group of blacks working for the North, the Union, and Lincoln.  Her disguise necessitates her posing as a mute slavery and subjecting her to humiliations that she'd thought she'd escaped.  It also puts her in the path of Malcolm McCall, a Pinkerton detective who is also spying on the South, though he has the privilege of being a man and white and so gets to pose as a soldier instead of a slave.  Upon their first encounter, Elle and Malcolm are both attracted to each other--at least after they establish that Malcolm hasn't shown up to rape Elle.  But despite their attraction, Elle is leery of Malcolm for very good reasons.  You know, like the fact that she's black and he's white and there can never be an equal power dynamic between them, society will never accept them, and she's not really sure if he really likes her or if he just wants a taste of something taboo.  So there are a few obstacles in the way of their romance.

Cole does such a great job bringing Elle and Malcolm together.  There's a keen awareness of unequal power dynamics in the very nature of their relationship and Cole (and Malcolm, by extension) does everything possible to even the playing field, making sure that Elle's consent is highly visible at every step of the way and that Malcolm backs off every time she seems like she's about to say no.  After he saves her twice, she makes a request that she save him the next time--and then she does, in spectacular fashion.  And of course, Elle is the one who puts together the pieces to figure out what is going on with a ship that could threaten the the outcome of the blockade and the war itself.  Elle is a strong, remarkable woman even when she's being humiliated and put down, in direct contrast to her "mistress" who is a downright bitch and petty and vindictive even when she already has everything she could ever want.

The writing here is excellent, the pacing is on-spot, and the chemistry between Elle and Malcolm absolutely sizzles.  However, I do have two issues.  My first complaint is that not a lot is done to show Elle and Malcolm's backgrounds; a few things are stated, like the reason for Malcolm's family's immigration to the United States and how Elle came to be free and lost her best friend and former lover, but there's not a lot of insight into how that made them the people that they are.  And second, while I think the individual plots of the spy mission and romance are done well, they're not necessarily woven together well.  I liked how Elle and Malcolm teamed up to pool information and find out about the ship, but the spying aspects and romance aspects seemed to seesaw from one extreme to the other without much in-between.  Still, this was highly enjoyable and I'm definitely interested in reading more books in this series and by this author.

4 stars out of 5.

Crescent City - Belva Plain

I picked up this book in hopes that it would fulfill the "Civil War romance" category in the Unapologetic Romance Readers 2017 challenge.  When it quickly became evident that it would not, I should have just let it go.  But I didn't.  I was also reading another of those family-centered sagas, The Tea Rose, and quite enjoying it, so I kept hoping I'd hit a point in Crescent City where it would have the same impact.  Unfortunately, it never did, and it became a slog just to get through it.

Basically, this book wants to be Gone With the Wind.  Not in location or characters or even plot (well, somewhat plot) but in structure and feel.  Ultimately, however, it doesn't capture the sweeping scope or any of the emotion that GWTW, problematic as it is at points, displays with such beauty.

The main character here is Miriam, whose Jewish family hails from Germany.  Her father left Miriam and her older brother with their maternal grandfather after the death of their mother, and the book begins with him returning to take them to New Orleans, where he's built a new prosperous life.  Some of the book attempts to deal with faith and maintaining it in times of hardship and in the face of adversity, and some of it tries to deal with matters like the immorality of slavery but also wanting to support your family who support slavery--but none of this is handled very well, and the main character who actually has these struggles, Miriam's brother, is kind of written off in the end as a "social justice warrior" of the 1800s, with an attitude of "Oh, he picks up whatever cause comes his way, none of them are really meant or important," which really irked me.

Most of the book is really about Miriam's life in an unhappy marriage, one she's basically forced into before she's ready to a man she despises.  With twin children and a large extended family to care for, Miriam struggles with keeping her life together during the Civil War, including engaging in an illicit romance outside of her marriage and another interested party who she loves but in a brotherly way--awkward.  While all of this seems like it would be ripe for a story full of emotion, Plain's writing manages to be flat and boring, making every chapter seem interminable and the entire book feel like a slog towards some unknown goal that never truly felt reached.  The setting in both place and time held so much promise, but aside from a few atmospheric happenings, they weren't leveraged to the story's benefit.  Having a Jewish main character in this time and place was interesting, but it only occasionally played into the story and didn't really lead to much conflict other than a few spats between Miriam and one of her stepsisters (I think; the relations here were a bit complicated).  At a few points, Plain also falls into the bad habit of using lengthy journal or letter entries to convey the characters' emotions, because she's not really adept at working them into the narrative itself.

Also, the Kindle edition of this book is very poorly converted from the text version, so readers beware on that.

Ultimately, a cold and boring book that didn't deliver on the promise it held.  If you're looking for something Gone With the Wind-like in scope and feel, read The Thorn Birds or maybe The Tea Rose; Crescent City just can't compare.

1.5 stars out of 5.