I read this book The Left Hand of Darkness over the weekend. I think, with the title, I was worried it would be a little more somber than it was, and it took me a while to start, but once I got past the third page I was hooked. The world building is immense, but Le Guin’s writing style is so engaging it never bogs down.

In the future, Earth’s humans have joined a sort of consortium with all the races of men spread across the stars by a progenitor race. All the planets in the consortium are self-governing. Since there is no faster-than-light travel in this universe, trade does happen between the planets, but it is extremely limited. Primarily the trade is of ideas.

The consortium is reaching out to a new planet of people, on the planet called Winter, which has been stuck for quite some time in an ice age, and the author has very carefully constructed a society around this reality (probably based on reading about Inuit and other northern people’s natural adaptations.) Unlike all other planets in the consortium, the people of Winter are morphologically aesexual, except for a few days each month when they become either male or female. Le Guin does believe gender influences psychology, and the book explores how all the people of a world being neither male or female most of the time influences their behavior.

Winter’s people have reached approximately a 1950s stage of technological advancement, when an envoy from the consortium arrives. This is the envoy’s story as he tries to open up Winter to the trade of ideas–Winter does have things to share, and a point of the story is that all people do, even the seemingly more primitive ones. It is also the story of one of Winter’s people who wants to see him succeed at his goal.

Unfortunately for the envoy and his benefactor, the rest of Winter thinks the envoy is lying, and great many of them want him dead. That is the source of the book’s adventure and intrigue.

The themes of opposites run through the book: darkness and light, religious and non-religious, male and female. It’s a beautiful book, and I do wish I could find out more about the Envoy’s later life after the book’s end. I highly recommend it. The Left Hand of Darkness is traditionally published, but it’s also a classic. That means you’ll probably find it at your local library. I got it through Overdrive at my local library. It’s also available at Amazon, Nook, iBooks, Kobo, GooglePlay, and Scribd (as an Audiobook).

A few weeks back I saw an interview with this book’s author and was fascinated. I spied the book at the Chicago Public Library, so I swooped in and grabbed it. Enemies in Love is not really a “romance,” it is a non-fiction book about the slow integration of the country and the issues surrounding it, and how those issues swirled around one particular couple, Elinor and Frederick, a black nurse and a German POW who met at a POW camp during WWII. It is amazing, and sometimes really heartbreaking, and reveals a lot of “hidden” history I knew nothing about.

For instance, I had no idea that during WW2 at one point there was a shortage of 10,000 nurses. This meant that our hospitals in Europe and Asia weren’t properly staffed and ready to accommodate men and women who were grievously injured. Nurses are critical to patient care (For any who doubt the importance of nurses: http://www.nber.org/papers/w23174), and this likely led to unnecessary deaths.

And I do mean unnecessary. There weren’t allowed to be any more black nurses than an arbitrary quota. Also, they were only allowed to serve black service members until the very end of the war. Thousands of black nurses who passed the same nursing exams that white nurses took applied to join the army, but were turned away. It’s really scary that leaders in our military were willing to risk the lives of young GIs rather than look past prejudice. (Side note: my grandfather served aboard a bomber as a gunner during WWII. He risked his life every time he went up in a plane, but he also almost died on the ground of pneumonia. I had to put the book down for a while after reading about the ‘manufactured’ nurse shortage.)

The book is also an excellent account of our POW camps. Despite some abuses, the U.S. actually did a good job of treating our POWs humanely. The same cannot be said of our allies, and certainly not of our enemies (a friend’s grandfather survived the Bataan Death March–it is not an event you ever get over.) It was distressing to read how POWs in the U.S. were often treated better than our own people, but it also showed how such endeavors can be humane.

I also really enjoyed how the book documented the main couple’s families. Elinor Powell’s family had been upper middle class for two generations before the war broke out, and it was fascinating to see how they managed this before the Civil Rights movement. They had a strong work ethic, but it was also largely a function of where they lived: a small suburban town called Milton, Massachusetts. Her grandfather had been a trusted servant of a white family–so trusted they gave him a beautiful house. He was a barber, but quite skilled as a craftsman in general, and helped build homes for his white neighbors. His wife was an escaped slave, and their son grew up among their white neighbors as a popular and appreciated member of the community. Elinor’s father got an apprenticeship, but when WWI broke out, he went overseas to fight for his country. He came home, got a civil servant’s job, joined the local fire brigade, and helped out his neighbors when the recession hit and he was well off and they were suffering … basically he was an all around great guy that people liked. He married a black Southern school teacher who had grown up under very different circumstances.

As a result of her location, and her parent’s hard work and belief in education, Elinor grew up in pre-Civil Rights America without ever really experiencing racism and never knowing poverty. Joining the segregated military and serving on a segregated base was a shock. The book goes to pains to mention that not all of the Army bases were segregated, a lot depended on the officer in charge, and some of those officers took very courageous stands not just on the bases, but in the surrounding towns. The officer in charge of Elinor’s base however, was terrible … which might be why he got the job guarding over POWs to begin with.

And then there was Frederick’s family … You know how most books and movies feature either Jewish protagonists or Christian Germans who fought against the Nazis? Well, Frederick’s parents were straight up Nazis. It was interesting to read about them for that reason. When I meet people who are genuinely racist in this day and age, they are never only racist against one group–they hate a lot of people and have a lot of, well, let’s just call them “issues.” The same can be said of Fredrick’s family … his dad was a successful businessman who used the war to get rich. He was also a serial philanderer who did nothing to hide his affairs and was never home. Frederick’s mom was a socialite who must have been hurt by her husband’s actions, but didn’t fight it. She also really didn’t care about her children as much as she cared about her social life. Despite their faults, they had Frederick, and he was not perfect, but he was a completely different person–and as such, was a complete disappointment to his parents. He loved art and jazz. The author speculates that he began to associate African American culture with all the emotion and love that was missing in his home. Maybe. However, the picture on the cover doesn’t really do Elinor justice; she was striking. It may have been just her beauty, and the fact that she was a nurse and so obviously intelligent and caring that made Frederick walk up to her the first time he laid eyes on her and say, “You should know my name. Someday I’m going to be your husband.”

It’s a great book, and I highly recommend it for it’s honest portrayal of real families dealing with real events.

You can get it on Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. It is also available at Scribd (for the moment, their catalog is variable.)

I picked up A Hope Divided with some trepidation. You know how you read a really good book, and after reading it you feel 1) Bereft 2) Certain that no other book can live up to your expectations. 3) You worry that the next book will be the same book with different names slapped on the previous characters. I was in that sort of post book high low after reading An Extraordinary Union.

A Hope Divided wasn’t An Extraordinary Union … it was better. It has all the things I loved about An Extraordinary Union: forbidden love, high stakes romance, history, and characters I really liked, but I think that I could identify with the characters a little more. An Extraordinary Union’s hero and heroine are based on real people, but they’re so blazingly heroic that in some ways it’s harder to identify with them. Hope’s Marlie and Ewan are more vulnerable; they are heroic in the story, but it is more because they have to be. They are both quiet individuals who’d probably be happier in a lab, but the war has forced them outside their comfort zones and they’re trying to make the best of it.

A little about the story: Marlie Lynch is half white and half black, a free black woman living with the very wealthy white half of her family in the Carolinas. She exists in a strange parallel world. She has the benefits of wealth and freedom, but the limitations of her race and sex. Her black mother was a “root woman,” and practitioner of “hoo-doo.” Marlie has turned the practical parts of her mother’s knowledge into a herbalist business.

I’m going to just say right here, that I was really impressed by how the author Alyssa Cole combined science and superstition in this book. She could have made magic real, or she could have dismissed it. Instead she walked a very narrow middle road and did a wonderful job showing how for Marlie’s slave ancestors, magic was really about trying to take control of their lives in a world that offered them few chances to do so. It also shows though, that some of their knowledge wasn’t just superstition.

Like a lot of romance novel series, the two male heroes are related. That may seem contrived to those unfamiliar with the genre–and indeed it is a little bit, but hey, it is a romance novel and I really liked Ewan. He isn’t like his brother at all, which is part of the reason this book is so good. He has a much more scientific mind, and he’s a joy to read. I’m not going to say too much more about that …

This book could be subtitled “Introverts in Love.” Alyssa Cole has captured the minds of two people who have very complex inner lives, and brings them out into the world. Danger runs high throughout the book. The romance is believable and incredibly sweet. (There are smexy scenes, so if those aren’t your cuppa, you might not like it. All of those scenes were well done and fit the characters, developed the story, and were more than just needing some nookie just because … )

Wonderful book. If you like historical romance definitely pick it up. It is traditionally published, and a little more expensive at $9.99 … but worth it. If you’re on a budget, it should be fairly easy to get your library to pick it up.

Happy reading!