Highlander Most Wanted

I did enjoy this but it’s a very typical sexy-Scottish laird-rescues- the-beautiful-damsel-in-de stress romance. It has a happy ending and all is well and they live happily ever after.... It seems sometimes you read one of these types of storylines you’ve read them all. This was a good book and I did like it but I have read better. This isn’t a type of book that you would want to read again and I’m not sure if I would read another book from this author. I’m sure they are similar. It was nicely written but I found myself skim reading a lot of the book to no consequence.It was corny at times especially the end but it was a sweet ending. If you enjoy sexy Highlander romances with a sweet but predictable ending(and story) you’ll enjoy this book.

I have mixed feelings about this book. To knock out the obvious dislike, it’s literally a copy paste of the previous book with the same plot points and even the same arguments/justifications. I’d skim over a lot of it because I knew where it was going because I had just read the previous book the night before. I rolled my eyes at the same dialogue in the same plot - man falls madly in love with a misunderstood woman, man defends her against anything and everything. Very boring the second time in a row.

Ok, now for the mixed part. Trigger warning for SA.

I, like many woman, have undergone something similar to the main character. So, on one hand, it’s really nice to see the emotions and shame surrounding the experience played out. It was nice to see a man defend and love, not revile a woman for what she went through. I also thought the author did a good job slowly explaining the trauma little by little through the book. She never went into deep detail, there was never a flashback. She gave the gist of what happened (except the was one instance where she was uncomfortably specific) in a way that got the point across but wasn’t too triggering, at least for me.

But it was too much about the SA- most of the book was the heroine wrestling with what had happened and moping about it. (Moping in the actual sense not the negative ‘stop moping about it.’) The book wasn’t a romance. It was a woman still in turmoil over the dark things she experienced and only at the 2/3rd mark did she start to have any experience of joy or happiness at all. She was still deep in the midst of her trauma and had not started recovering. The man who abused her died like 4days before the start of the story and she’s still surrounded by men who did horrible things to her. She’s still in the place where it all happened with people who knew what he was doing to her and not only did nothing about it but actively blame her for it and calling her a wh*re.

The hero had pretty much insta-love. When he found out what happened to her, his emotions toward her instantly changed and he was willing to break all the rules for her. The hero wasn’t in love with her- he pitied her and was sad that she went through the bad things. He knew nothing about her except what she had gone through. You can’t tell me that’s love.

So, the book turned into a woman wrestling with the dark things she experienced and a hero who pitied her. It wasn’t cute and it wasn’t believable. I do think it’s possible to have a romance novel where the main character has been SA’d (I’ve read them) but the plot of the book can’t be all about that. Why would you believe she wants a man to touch her when a page before she was lamenting all of the terrible things that happened to her? The author even called it out at one point when the heroine was ashamed that she enjoying cuddling with the hero after she was nearly raped the night before (the scene doesn’t work in the book and it felt like lampshading).

I felt like I was a part of the clan.. Wonderfully written.