I was fortunate enough to have been given the opportunity to read Rebel by Beverly Jenkins (thank you Netgalley!). This was a great book! Since I’m sure I’m going to also love Marie Lu’s Rebel later on this year, it looks like there will be two amazing books with that title out in 2019.
Val is a black schoolteacher in the days shortly after the Civil War. Although originally from New York, she’s in New Orleans for a short time while her intended is away in France on a business trip. She’s teaching a group of newly freed slaves (both children and adults) how to read. She’s proud of all the progress that her students are making.
But even though the slaves have been freed, this is still a dangerous time to be black and live in the South. A lot of white people don’t like the idea of black people becoming better people. A group of supremacists decide to derail Val’s teaching plans and try to attack her.
Val isn’t the kind of person that will allow herself to be attacked without fighting back though. And that’s how she meets Drake LaVeq.
LaVeq is instantly attracted to her, but after he deters the thugs that are after her, he thinks that’s the last he’ll see of her — until she ends up at his brother’s hotel. You’ll have to read the book to find out how they find their happily ever after.
There were a lot of things I loved about this book. For one thing, I loved Val’s character. She was brave and willing to stand up for herself, yet at the same time, she was realistically constrained by the expectations that society had for her at the time. She wasn’t this Mary Sue kind of character that would kick the bad guy’s butt and then nobody would think anything of it. This did happen right after the Civil War. Even in the 1960s, that would have been unrealistic. LaVeq was also a well-written character. He was generous, yet still had his own demons to deal with (part of them having to do with being interested in a lady that was engaged to another).
I thought the setting portrayed the struggles that black people had to deal with after the Civil War quite well. There were a lot of white people at the time that didn’t want to see black people do well. Some former slave owners tried to force their former slaves to work for them again. Black people’s testimony wasn’t worth as much in a court of law, and some white people could get away with terrorizing black people. The first black people were elected to the US Senate around this time; this book really brings to life the struggles these people must have gone through. At the same time, Rebel doesn’t gloss over the fact the everybody was struggling at the time. There were poor whites in the South at the time too.
In addition to the amazing setting and the great characters, the romance aspect of this story was good too. LaVeq was respectful and tried to maintain his distance from Val (although that wasn’t easy to do). I loved how they resolved the situation with Val’s intended, and even with her father (who is an old-fashioned kind of guy). Val and LaVeq were great together and their story was compelling.
If you’re interested in a romance set in the post-Civil War era, I highly recommend Rebel by Beverly Jenkins. She’s an outstanding author and I would read other books by her in the future.