Booklog 47/2019 - Alyson McLayne: Highland Captive – The Sons of Gregor MacLeod #4

[jacey]

First off, I'm reading this despite the cover. I hate covers with bare chested, kilted Scotsmen with a six pack and such overdeveloped muscles that they look like they have man-boobs. And don't get me started about the kilt he's wearing in the 1400s, several hundred years before it was developed. (In fairness to the author she never mentions kilts.)

Cover aside, did I like the book? Well, kind of. It's a decent book of its type. Deirdre MacIntyre, ignored wife of Lewis MacIntyre in more ways than one, has been given an orphan boy to raise as her own and for the last two and a half years she's poured all her love and energy into being a mother to (now) five year old Ewan. When she discovers he's the missing son of Laird Gavin MacKinnon, she's petrified that she will lose him. While her own husband is away from home (as he mostly is) Gavin and his men come for the boy and Gavin realises that Ewan is not going to go with him quietly without the only mother he remembers. Hence Deirdre becomes a more-or-less willing kidnap victim, who, after initial uncertainty, helps Gavin (a widower) and his son to gradually get to know each other again.

Gavin gradually regains the equilibrium he lost since the death of his (unsuitable) wife and the loss of his son, and, of course, falls for Deirdre – but she's another man's wife. And it looks as though the clans are about to go to war over the willing captive, or maybe there's something more sinister going on.

Wild Scottish romance seems to be a genre in its own right (since Outlander? Before Outlander?) mostly written by North Americans. I confess I haven't read a lot of them, so it would be unfair to compare this with others in the genre. Simply taking it as a one-off (I haven't read the series) this held my attention sufficiently. Deirdre fluctuates between bouts of wimpiness and moments of courage (I'm not sure how she can slide off a semi-motionless horse so many times) but she does gather strength as the book progresses. The characters are well developed and I take it that Gavin's foster brothers are each the subject of their own book. This is Book #4 in the series, but it can easily be read as a standalone.

My only other (small) gripe is the occasional strange sideswipe at dialect when don't becomes 'doona'.

Comments

[cmcmck]

Being married to someone of the Scottish persuasion that cover art makes me cringe!

[jacey]

Yes, it's truly awful on a number of levels - historical and physical! I confess to being one of those people who goes around netgalley marking covers showing men's (hairless) naked torsos as 'don't like'. We wouldn't accept it if they were women. We'd rail against objectification. It took ages for SF publishers to ditch the babes-in-chain-mail-bikinis type of covers. Tell me why it's different if it's a man.

[cmcmck]

A modern kilt rather than a plaid?

And a sword worn across the back and therefore impossible to draw rapidly in action?

Enough to make a military historian weep!

C'mon already!!

[jacey]

I suppose the sword worn across the back if he's just travelling and not actually intending to use it might... at a stretch... be the get-out for this one. In all fairness the author calls it a plaid and not a kilt, but the artist, sadly, didn't get the message.