Alyssa Cole is one of the best romance novelists working, and a new book from her is always cause for celebration. An Unconditional Freedom is the third in her Loyal League series, which follows Union spies working behind Confederate lines to ensure an end to slavery.
Daniel Cumberland joined the Loyal League to seek revenge: Born free, then sold into slavery by white men pretending to be abolitionists, Daniel has never recovered from the psychological scars his years in slavery inflicted. He has no interest in a new partner, let alone one as pretty and vivacious as Janeta Sanchez, a mixed-race Cuban woman. But Janeta holds secrets of her own: She is an unwilling double agent, sent to spy on the Union in order to secure the freedom of her slave-owning father.
In the hands of a less talented author than Alyssa Cole, this would have been a hard pairing to get me to root for. It was actually a hard pairing to get me to root for. Although Janeta’s position in her family has always been precarious, as the daughter of a former slave, she still plans to work against abolition. But Cole deftly shows us how Janeta’s strengths — which become clear to us and to Daniel over the course of the book — have arisen from that exact precarity. Daniel’s developing respect for Janeta’s ability to manipulate situations in her favor goes hand-in-hand with Janeta’s realization that her worldview has been deeply wrong — not just her ideas about slavery, but her ideas about herself. It’s just really, really nicely done.
The book handles Daniel’s trauma — and underlying goodness — with a similarly careful hand. Though Daniel believes himself to be weak for struggling to recover from his ordeal as a slave, the book is clear that isn’t the case. Instead, it makes the point that different people respond to trauma differently. Which is a simple point to make, but one that often goes ignored, and I appreciate Cole for bringing it to the forefront here. Daniel has begun to forgive himself by the end of this book, but it’s clear that recovery will be a long, slow process.
To the ongoing question of how one can set a romance in the midst of the Civil War, the answer continues to be “by engaging really carefully with the realities of the time period.” Our glimpses of Daniel’s past are horrifying. Cole has clearly done her research and shines a light into various aspects of slavery and the Civil War that make the book feel truly lived in. A good chunk of the plot deals with the issue of foreign intervention in the Civil War, a subject that occupied the two sides quite a lot at the time, but that I never learned about in history class. Daniel and Janeta are trying to disrupt the South’s efforts to gain European — and especially British — support, a support that much of the South believed, or hoped, they would be able to count on as the war went on.
Perhaps more important than the history — at least to me, in this political moment — are the things Cole has to say about America. Neither Daniel nor Janeta begins the book with much hope of improving the country. Daniel wants his revenge, and Janeta wants her life to go back to normal. They both discover that their previous normal was deeply corrosive to them, and that there’s more to strive for.
The past two years have shown more clearly than ever the corrosiveness of America’s status quo. Yet An Unconditional Freedom reminds the reader that America is also its people, that the most downtrodden people can still carry a spark of hope that brings light in the darkness and maybe, eventually, a brighter future.
Prepare, in short, to get emotional, not just about Daniel and Janeta, but about the country we live in and the one we hope to create.
(I received an e-copy of this book for review from the publisher. This has not impacted the contents of my review.)