NB: Welcome to Flashback Friday! Because of Carrie’s Four Weddings and a Sixpence anthology review, we wanted to run another anthology with a similar grade that we enjoyed. The Brightest Day has one of Sarah’s favorite novellas of 2015! This review was originally published June 17, 2015.

Reviewing anthologies is always difficult for me. I’m never sure if I should give a grade for the collection as a whole, even if some of the stories didn’t grab me, or if I should grade the story that rocked my world and mention the others. Anthologies are awesome – I love novellas and short stories – but also tricky.

So here’s the deal with this one: I loved the last story in this anthology so much. SO MUCH. I sent screen cap texts of funny lines to people. I rambled on to Hubby about it. I set timers so I could read another page or two without burning dinner. Let it Shine by Alyssa Cole is the reason you should buy this anthology.

I should start with that one, but I won’t. I don’t want to skip over the other stories entirely, though I don’t have as much to say as I do for Let it Shine. So this review will be a bit uneven.

The Brightest Day is a Juneteenth anthology, and each story features a celebration or acknowledgement of June 19th, which marked the end of slavery in Texas. From Juneteenth.com:

Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19th that the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free.

Juneteenth is celebrated annually in communities today, though not all states recognize it as an official day of observance. If you’d like to find a local celebration, there’s a directory at Juneteenth.com.

Each story in the anthology takes place at a different period in history ranging from 1866 to 1961, but Juneteenth appears in all of them. I’ll be grading each story individually, then averaging them for the final anthology grade at the end.

Amazing Grace by Lena Hart: C-

Summary, from the cover copy: It’s the year 1866—the Civil War is over and slavery has ended. Life for 18-year-old Gracie Shaw takes an unexpected turn when she is “encouraged” to marry a man sight-unseen. Boarded on a train headed West—to lawless territory—she is faced with misfortune at every turn and must accept the help of former Confederate soldier, Logan Finley, while denying herself the one thing she wants most. Him.

I wanted to like this one – there’s a road trip! on a train! What’s not awesome about that?! It’s a huge dose of my catnip. But the dialogue was too sparse for me, and the writing between the dialogue portions had a sort of formality and distance that made it hard for me to engage with. There was a lot of telling, and the telling didn’t grab me at all. Plus, lines of dialogue were frequently followed by a few sentences of exposition that interrupted more than supported the conversation.

I did like that Grace and Logan got to know each other by arguing with each other, though I wish more of their arguments and debates had been written out instead of summarized. I learn a great deal more about characters if “their verbal sparring” became an actual conversation, especially because the conflict between them, which I don’t want to spoil, is something they likely debated about. Because of that lack of development in their relationship, when their relationship moved to a physical level, I was surprised – I didn’t think they had enough of a connection between them. The sex scene seemed sudden and out of place to me.

The issues and the secrets being kept, though, were real and complicated, and I had a lot of respect for the heroine and her backbone and integrity. I wish the relationship had developed more. It’s hardest for me to buy a HEA in a novella when the characters meet at the beginning of the story for the first time, and not a lot of time passes during the course of the story. Because they first meet at the start of the novella, they have a long way to travel – literally and figuratively – by the end, and in my opinion their relationship and HEA seemed based on summarized insistence on the part of both characters than on a real and tangibly written connection.

Drifting to You, by Kianna Alexander: C+

Summary: During the sultry Carolina summer of 1875, baker Rosaline Rhodes boards a Juneteenth cruise down the Cape Fear River. She’s there to serve her famous cinnamon spice cake; shipbuilder Will Pruett is there for pleasure. They’ve denied their mutual attraction for months, but now the river won’t be the only thing ebbing and flowing.

The opening scenes where the heroine, Rosaline, is preparing a spice cake and goes shopping for the ingredients were so vivid, I could see her in my mind, where she was, what it looked like, what the market and the spice stall smelled like. I liked that both the hero and heroine are focused on building their own businesses, and are cautious and thrilled to be owning the enterprise in which they work, since slavery is in the very recent past for them both. They manage their careers with a lot of ingenuity and creativity. Rosaline, for example, designs a box to carry a layer cake safely that sounded ingenious. Will himself owns the shipyard he used to work in as a slave and he’s very proud of his work.

But I was never fully sure of the conflict between the hero and heroine, and felt that the scenes that introduced problems between them were too easily addressed or solved. The conflicts, if they were cats, had teeth and claws and puffy tails in the build up, but in the resolution were suddenly much smaller matters, more easily soothed and settled.

A Sweet Way to Freedom by Piper Hugeley: B-

Summary: In 1910, schoolteacher Missouri Baxter refuses to return home with a big belly and no husband. She’s got nine months to teach juke joint owner Arlo Tucker—a most reluctant student—an important lesson about what marriage means to their people. With God on her side, she’ll show him “A Sweet Way to Freedom.”

NB: This story is part of Huguley’s Milford College series — historical romances set in a small Black college in Georgia. The story is a stand-alone, though; you don’t need to read all the stories in the series to understand this one. But if you like it, there are more!

Oh, this story was a challenge. The hero is the town player who has fathered children with other women, and the heroine is the local schoolteacher — and is nine months pregnant with his child. They’re not married, and she gets fired from her job – by the hero’s sister, who is also nine months pregnant (but the sister is married so her pregnancy is not scandalous).

I really liked Missouri, the heroine in this story. She took absolutely no crap, and she was strong and capable, but also aware of how her actions affected others. She knew that being college educated was something that set her apart from everyone in town, most of whom work in a local mill, and her being pregnant sets her apart even further because she’s unmarried and therefore morally suspect.

Missouri is also adept at understanding the immediate need and the bigger picture in most situations. There’s one scene where she wants to mention to a young girl graduating from her one-room schoolhouse that she’s smart enough to go to high school and to college, but she knows introducing such an idea would only cause the girl and her family heartache and disappointment because financially and logistically it’s not an option. It should be, but it’s not.

The problem for me was the hero, Arlo. He’s smooth talking, musically gifted, and slippery. I didn’t fully buy his sudden awareness of his responsibilities, and I wasn’t entirely sure where he’d been or what he’d been doing for the prior nine months of Missouri’s pregnancy. I wasn’t convinced of his ability to sustain a relationship because I didn’t see much of him doing so until the very end. He’s outlandish and silly in his declarations to Missouri, but his turnaround and redemption were too swift and didn’t have enough visible action to support them. There were some big gestures and plenty of enthusiasm, but I missed the smaller moments that would have indicated more of his dedication to his determination to be a good husband and father.

Let It Shine by Alyssa Cole: A-

Summary: Sofronia Wallis knows that proper Black women don’t court trouble by upending the status quo, and they most certainly don’t associate with roughneck Jewish boxers like Ivan Friedman. But it’s 1961 and the Civil Rights movement is in full swing. Change—and love—are coming whether Sofie is ready or not.

OH MY GOSH YOU GUYS. SQUEE CANNON IS SET TO STUN.

It might seem that I’m predisposed to like the one story with the Jewish character, but while I do raise a glass to my own bias (L’Chaim!), the writing in this story, coupled with the coincidental present/past parallels and the balance of tension and beauty made this story worth the cost of the anthology as a whole.

The heroine, Sofie, is the buttoned-up daughter of a strict single father during the beginning of the civil rights movement. Trying to manage her own rebellious feelings of anger toward hypocritical church elders, she sees a flyer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and attends a meeting. While she’s there, she notices Ivan, a Jewish boxer who now lives with his widowed father. Ivan and Sofie played together as children because Sofie’s mother worked for Ivan’s family as a housekeeper until her sudden death from a brain aneurysm.

Ivan has hidden a major crush on Sofie, and Sofie is awed by and attracted to Ivan, who is involved in SNCC to teach people how to take a punch so it hurts less – something he knows a lot about.

You guys. There are moments in this story that are so intense I thought I was going to stop breathing. At one point he unbuttons her glove and it’s incredibly hot. There’s another scene where Sofie sits down at a lunch counter, and her calm determination made my heart beat faster. The small moments in this story are the most powerful, and the tension between Sofie and Ivan, and between SNCC and the community in which they live is ferocious in its intensity. Sofie decides to stop complying and her small and large rebellions push the story and are reflected in the actions of the people around her.

The eeriest thing about reading this story is that during the SNCC meetings, the characters stop to watch horrible events taking place on tv – townspeople setting a Freedom Ride bus on fire with protesters and passengers inside, and beating protesters bloody with pipes and sticks. It’s horrible. And if I turn on my computer right now, I will see similar scenes on Twitter of brutality against young black people. It’s a horrid and infuriating parallel, but it added to the tension of this story. Some of the issues facing Ivan and Sofie are over and gone – miscegenation laws among them, thank God – but the violence continues in nearly the same pattern.

Cole’s ability to balance the light and funny with the painful and wretched made this story work so well. I was scared for and hopeful for Ivan and Sofie, especially as they confronted the prejudice and racism of their own fathers as well as the larger racism and violence in their own community, and in the south in the 60s. Their HEA is not easy, and they go through a few kinds of hell during the course of the story, but the quiet moments, such as when Ivan brings Sofie to his gym, or when she cooks for him and their fathers, are just as powerful in their warmth and beauty as the scenes wherein they face people who are vicious and cruel. This story worked so well for me.

Overall Grade

Unfortunately, each story had a copyediting problem and the anthology would have benefitted from closer proofreading. There were a number of misused words, for example, like when a character could “endear” without complaint instead of “endure.” That bugged me, and I want to mention it because I know that upsets some readers, too.

As I said, anthologies are difficult to grade sometimes. Some of the stories I found myself skimming, while with Cole’s story, I was gripping my ereader so tightly my hands started to ache. I’m giving this anthology a B- overall, averaging together the grades above.