I liked this book! I did. But I wanted to love it, and I didn’t. Ugh, and all the pieces for me loving it were in place! Tensions over class, racial and gender divides. A romance involving characters who logistically will find it difficult to be together (white man/black woman). A badass heroine who does really cool things all while still experiencing the full range of human emotion. The idea that the heroine was black was also appealing, because my favorite genre of romance (historicals) […]
Despite the great reviews, I hesitated
Despite all the the good reviews and word of mouth from fellow Cannonballers, I was reluctant to start Alyssa Cole’s An Extraordinary Union. How can a romance between a black woman and a white man set during the Civil War be anything other than hugely problematic? If this book had been written by a white woman, I wouldn’t have touched it at all. Alyssa Cole is not white, and she is gaining a reputation for writing historical romances that challenge convention. This is the only […]
Romance among resistance
Courtney Milan has been a vocal fan of Alyssa Cole for awhile now, and I’m a vocal fan of Courtney Milan, so I have been harboring guilt for waiting until now to read Cole. Something about the blurbs for her previous series weren’t setting me on fire, but An Extraordinary Union sounded unique and daring — a black woman (Elle) undercover as a slave during the Civil War who falls for a white man (Malcolm) undercover as a Confederate soldier? Wow. I’m not trying to […]
A slave and a Confederate soldier fall in love. What could go wrong?
Alyssa Cole is an author well-liked by other authors I like. Her Off the Grid trilogy is especially popular, but the post-apocalyptic setting isn’t my favorite. I did like her historical short story Agnes Moor’s Wild Knight so when An Extraordinary Union came up for pre-order, I didn’t hesitate. I paid a full sawbuck for this e-book, y’all. That’s how much faith I had that I was going to like it. An Extraordinary Union did not disappoint. The short version: Ellen Burns uses her eidetic memory to serve […]