An Extraordinary Union—Alyssa Cole

"Either her superior had dreadfully underestimated the Southern male's love of an opportunity to do violence, or he'd purposely set her in the middle of danger. She doubted it was the latter, but the man was unduly annoyed at her for having the gall to aid her country without virtue of a certain appendage hanging between her thighs. As if a penis would somehow prove more useful to the Cause than her peculiar "gift." From what Elle had discerned over the last few months, whatever supposed benefits the organ conferred were canceled out by mulishness and a propensity for tomfoolery." (1)

The above quote happens on the first page, and really set the tone for how much I was going to end up loving this book.

Elle is a free Black woman (and former slave) during the Civil War who has a photographic memory. In order to help aid the Union cause, she essentially goes undercover as a slave. It allows her to get closer to the men making the decisions for the Confederacy, and it also allows her a sort of invisibility so that she can discover war plans, but it also puts her in dangerous and fraught situations. When on a job she meets Malcolm, a detective in the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Turns out, they were sent to work on the same job together. Personalities clash, plots are foiled, and Elle and Malcolm get closer.

Elle is one of my favourite leading ladies of any series ever, let alone a romance series. She is independent and fucking brilliant and brave. She is truly the heroine of the piece. And though it is technically a romance (and there are definitely steamy scenes that warrant an NC-17 rating), the non-romance parts of the book are so incredibly well crafted and well written that the romance is secondary. By which I mean all of the plot points are not mere devices in order to get the hero and heroine together. Which is something I almost never get to say about a romance series.

I really appreciated that Cole directly addressed the interracial relationship that takes place, the struggle and difficulty that Elle faces when she realizes her feelings. I seem to have heard about a number of Civil War novels in the past few years that have featured an "interracial romance" that either features a completely skewed power dynamic (i.e. slave falls in love with her slave master) or ignores the concept of race entirely. I'm not exactly sure how those books got published, because they seem completely insane on the surface. But at least there are now books like this one to balance that out.

As we live and interact with a country that is more and more divided, many of the themes that Cole touches on in this book feel all too relevant today: men not understanding what they are fighting for, people who are so clearly on the losing side of history proclaiming that God is on their side, the conflict between the ideals we believe our forefathers held and reconciling that with not only their personal pasts (which were often questionable at best) and our future as a country.

Highly, highly, highly recommend for anyone interested in spy stories, intrigue, historical fiction, with a smattering of romance. And she actually uses the word penis in the book rather than a bunch of euphemisms!

My sister got me the most recent book in this series, A Hope Divided, for Christmas, and I'm really looking forward to diving into it and seeing where Elle's journey goes.