Hope is dangerous. Love is deadly.

1506, Joseon. The people suffer under the cruel reign of the tyrant King Yeonsan, powerless to stop him from commandeering their land for his recreational use, banning and burning books, and kidnapping and horrifically abusing women and girls as his personal playthings.

Seventeen-year-old Iseul has lived a sheltered, privileged life despite the kingdom’s turmoil. When her older sister, Suyeon, becomes the king’s latest prey, Iseul leaves the relative safety of her village, traveling through forbidden territory to reach the capital in hopes of stealing her sister back. But she soon discovers the king’s power is absolute, and to challenge his rule is to court certain death.

Prince Daehyun has lived his whole life in the terrifying shadow of his despicable half-brother, the king. Forced to watch King Yeonsan flaunt his predation through executions and rampant abuse of the common folk, Daehyun aches to find a way to dethrone his half-brother once and for all. When staging a coup, failure is fatal, and he’ll need help to pull it off—but there’s no way to know who he can trust.

When Iseul’s and Daehyun’s fates collide, their contempt for each other is transcended only by their mutual hate for the king. Armed with Iseul’s family connections and Daehyun’s royal access, they reluctantly join forces to launch the riskiest gamble the kingdom has ever seen:

Save her sister. Free the people. Destroy a tyrant.

READ THIS NOTE, ESPECIALLY THE END

Author’s Note – King Yeonsan (deposed name: Yeonsangun) ruled from 1495 to 1506 and was considered the worst tyrant in Korean history. Supposedly, he ruled decently for the first nine years of his reign, but in 1504—after learning of how his mother had been executed—he went on a revenge spree that began the bloodiest purge of his reign.
Emboldened by the absolute power he held, Yeonsan began committing widespread atrocities—stealing land from the people to turn into his personal hunting grounds, executing his own family members, murdering government officials in the cruelest ways, and kidnapping and enslaving women from every province.
I believe it’s important to tell history as it is, with all its violence and corruption, and so I did not shy away from the realities of Yeonsan’s reign. His crimes were so numerous, though, that I couldn’t mention them all in the story. But for the ones I did, I’d like to offer the following content warnings:
rape (mentioned), sexual abuse, misogyny, kidnapping women and girls, sex trafficking, incest (mentioned), violence, murder, animal cruelty, suicide (mentioned), infanticide (mentioned), psychological trauma, panic attacks

Dear Ms. Hur,

Two years ago, I read and enjoyed “The Red Palace” which had some dark stuff in it. Well, this one tops that. I’m glad that you included what you did in your author’s note and I hope people pay attention to the warnings. This book is being tagged (given the age of the MCs) as young adult but given the nature of the content, I would be very careful about how old readers are who read it.

Iseul was the pampered youngest daughter of a high ranking Joseon Korean magistrate when her world came crashing down. Her parents were murdered by soldiers on order of the king leaving Iseul and her older sister to seek refuge with their grandmother (who is only mentioned in the book). Then her sister (with whom Iseul has a fractious relationship – all due to Iseul) is kidnapped and taken by the king as a concubine – one among almost a thousand most of whom are subjected to sexual abuse. Iseul is convinced that this is all her fault and she’s going to make it right. How, she has no clue but she’s gonna do it.

Arriving at an inn not far from the capital, Iseul is taken under the wing of the innkeeper and a former investigator. Yul promises to treat Iseul like family in exchange for Iseul helping at the inn (something she only sporadically does) while Wonsik tries to tutor her in how to investigate a series of murders and discover who the serial killer is (something Iseul pouts about as Wonsik actually wants her to use her brain while she just wants him to tell her what she wants to know). Then an illegitimate prince gets involved (as he also scrambles day by day to keep his psycho half-brother the king from killing him). Iseul wants to save her sister while Daehyun has grander plans – to overthrow the king in a coup. Will they get what they want or die trying?

I applaud the use of this unusual setting and the fact that readers are not molly coddled by having Korean words, terms and things used and then immediately translated into English. The meanings are made plain through the descriptions and if that doesn’t work then there’s always Google. Also booyah for (as stated in the author’s note) not shying away from the brutality of what was actually happening in this time. Yes, it’s hard to read but how much harder must it have been to try to live through it.

While I enjoyed being set down in Joseon Korea again, there were a lot of things that didn’t work for me here. Iseul is, quite frankly, a spirited young woman who hasn’t an ounce of common sense. I understand that she was raised to be waited on by servants, has no life skills, is probably still upset about how her life has been upended, and probably looking for a way to get it back. However she’s ready to snap at anyone who (she thinks) is getting in her way and charge off into danger without bothering to think things through. That these people she’s snapping at are often trying to help her or that if her harebrain (lack of) plans might get her killed or kidnapped herself don’t stop her. I’ll give her courage. I’ll give her determination. But she doesn’t seem to learn and she’s also at times an idiot.

Daehyun is a bit smarter and can roll with a dangerous situation while keeping a cool head. He’s had to as the king loves playing “games” that usually end with a courtier being killed for the king’s amusement. Daehyun has plans though. If he and a small, loyal band can seize the moment, they can dethrone the tyrant making everyone’s life hell. Except he knows that this rag-tag band isn’t enough so some (I’ll be honest, boring) scenes of behind-the-scenes political negotiation to induce powerful men to join them take place. First though he has to attempt to keep Iseul from doing anything stupid and rescue her a time or three when she does.

The story has tons of secondary and tertiary characters. Honestly, too many. And it’s not trying to keep the Korean names straight that was my problem. I would feel the same if this were a historical set during the English War of the Roses. After a while, people began to blur. After a while, plot points began to blur as well. There’s Iseul saving her sister, Daehyun plotting, Wonsik giving Iseul tips on murder investigation, Yul keeping the inn afloat, the whackjob king, sleazy courtiers, a group of court jesters who skip in and out, lots of running around the countryside, a violent coup, and tons of background details. As the plot revved up and sped towards the finish I had already gotten more than a bit lost.

I cheered when (some of) the mistreated women rescued themselves. I did love that Iseul refused to give up trying to get her sister out of a living nightmare and then further protected her from the terrible fate that met many of the other women the king had kidnapped and debauched (and society is rarely forgiving of a woman’s loss of “honor”). I never quite got what Daehyun saw in Iseul beyond that she’s feisty as she never grew much as a character. I questioned the need for the murders in the story and also began mentally picking apart and poking holes in how the serial killer managed all that was done. The reality of the post-coup was depressing as well. I think if I had read this book when I was younger, I might like it more but I didn’t and I don’t. C

~Jayne

AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle

Dear Julie Ann Long:

This is the latest (the seventh) installment in the Palace of Rogues series; I believe I’ve read every book except book three, though I started out of order. I began with book four, After Dark with the Duke, which is still by far my favorite in the series.

Anyway, on to My Season of Scandal. Catherine Keating is a young country miss in London for the Season, courtesy of an acquaintance named Lady Wisterberg. There’s not room for Cat at the crowded London townhouse that Lady Wisterberg and her goddaughter are staying at. So Cat is staying at the Grand Palace on the Thames, where the proprietresses will serve as chaperones when she’s not in the care of Lady Wisterberg. Cat is the sensible daughter of a widowed country doctor; at 22, this is likely her only chance to come to London, experience some adventure, and perhaps meet a husband.

Lord Dominic Kirke is also staying at the GPotT; his home is unlivable currently due to his mistress having set it on fire. Dominic is 35 (I side-eye such age differences, especially coupled with life-experience differences, in a way I never used to) and a notorious member of the House of Commons. I’m a tiny bit confused, in retrospect, about him being a lord and being a member of the House of Commons, though to be fair I don’t really know how that all works, and Dominic’s title is definitely not inherited, so perhaps it makes sense.

Cat and Dominic first encounter each other after he visits her room late at night to complain about the noise Cat is making; freshly arrived in London, and unused to her new surroundings and relative freedom, Cat is belting out a naughty song she learned in the GPotT’s drawing room, and dancing around, inadvertently knocking over furniture. The encounter is brief but Kirke makes an impression.

They meet again the next evening, at a ball. Catherine, overwhelmed by the crowds, is hiding among ferns when she overhears an encounter between Kirke and an obnoxious aristocrat, Farquar. That meeting ends with Farquar trying to punch Kirke, and Cat hurries away, only to run into him again minutes later in a secluded location (of course). They engage in banter and she confesses to him that she was made to feel bad about the age of her dress and not having the most in-fashion sleeves. There’s an attraction; hesitant on Cat’s part due to Kirke’s infamy and dangerous air, and somewhat detached on Kirke’s part, because he knows they aren’t suited (I’ll give him a bit of credit there). Still, after they part he does her a service – pays a footman to make sure that Lady Wisterberg, apparently a gambling fiend, leaves on time with Cat in order to get Cat home before the GPotT’s curfew.

The two continue to be thrown together at balls and at the mandatory GPotT’s dinners and evenings spent in the sitting room. There’s a slow-ish build up to admiration and attraction, which I appreciated, and as mentioned above Kirke is pretty sure that it can’t go anywhere, and Cat is probably a bit too dazzled and unworldly to imagine that it could, either. Kirke does go out of his way to do something unusual for him – he dances with Cat publicly at a ball, thus setting her up as the Next Big Thing in the minds of the ton.

Cat is happy with her newfound social success but she is still very drawn to Kirke. Kirke is nursing a secret (though some in the ton know, so I guess it’s not entirely a secret) and eventually he shares it with Cat.

Eventually Cat and Kirke’s relationship progresses to doing naughty things in the garden of balls, which…no, I am just over that at this stage in my life. Maybe once it seemed daring and sexy, now it just seems dumb and I wonder what the h/h think they are doing.

I felt like there was perhaps a bit less time spent at the GPotT than in previous books. I had mixed feelings about that; on the one hand I really like the cozy “found family” conceit of the setting, however twee and unrealistic it may be. On the other hand there is just so much lore and insider information that gets repeated in every book, and it can get tedious.

To borrow a phrase from today’s youth, My Season of Scandal was very mid for me. I think I would have gotten a lot more out of it at another time in my romance reading. It has good writing, a nice, simple plot without a lot of extraneous nonsense, and sympathetic characters. But it’s a plot and characters that, with minor variation, I have seen a thousand times. And that just doesn’t do much for me anymore – maybe it never will again. I just know that when I dip my toes back into historical romance, nine of ten (or more) books just aren’t moving me because they aren’t unusual enough. After Dark with the Duke might actually be the last one that qualifies.

So, my grade for My Season of Scandal is a C+, with the qualification (one I seem to be making almost every time I review historical romance these days) – I think a lot of other historical romance fans might like this more than I did.

Best,

Jennie

AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle

Welcome back to Wednesday Links!

I had my Romance Novel + Cheese Night on Friday and it went really well! Keep your eyes peeled for a write-up soon on how it went and what the yummy pairings were.

I’m still a little sick so my partner and I definitely put a pause on any Valentine’s Day celebrations. We even had a fancy dinner reservations planned, which we wound up cancelling in favor of eating chips and dips.

Listen, I was recording a podcast episode with Sarah and she mentioned bean dip and that was suddenly all I could think about.

…

The Guardian wrote about the influx of romance bookstores popping up around the U.S. Do you have one near you? Have you visited one?

…

This link came from Marlene! The New York Public Library compiled a list of new romances. I think it’s a pretty great list!

…

Posted on r/HistoricalRomance, there’s a lovely tribute to author Louisa Rawlings who passed away recently.

…

These leading men have the Hallmark Channel on speed dial! I definitely think it’s interesting that Hallmark often reuses the same actors and actresses. Thanks to EC Spurlock for this one!

…

I’m always so impressed by people’s creativities. Look at these cool wreaths!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Kristin Boyle (@wickedwreaths22)

…

Don’t forget to share what cool or interesting things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!

Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend is a funny, sweet variation on The Parent Trap. The plot is simple but the characters and their activities are uniformly delightful. This was a fun historical f/f romance with serious stakes that kept me wildly entertained until the last page. It’s the first in the Mischief and Matchmaking series.

The plot, as I said, is super simple: Beth, who doesn’t want to get married, has one season in which to snag a wealthy husband lest she and her mother be doomed to a life of poverty. Gwen has plenty of money and never has to get married, but is slogging through her fourth season. When the girls become friends, they discover that their parents had a mysterious connection in the past. Instead of getting married themselves, what if they could make a match between Beth’s poor mother and Gwen’s rich father? Problem solved – except that the parents seem to hate each other, and every scheme of the girls deepens the animosity. Meanwhile, Beth and Gwen find themselves increasingly fascinated by and attracted to one another.

I’m not generally a fan of Parent Trap-type stories, but this one has tons of humor and charm, character building, creativity, and chemistry. It helps that there’s no “separated at birth” stuff going on. Instead there’s a mystery to unravel about what the parents once were to each other, and why there’s so much animosity now.

Being a lesbian in the Victorian era was no joke and so Gwen and Beth have to be creative with their happy ending – and the minute they’ve sorted out their own, they are shipping another queer couple who, I assume, will be in the next book. The romance between shy Beth and slightly more worldly Gwen is tentative and fumbling and adorable, and their growing intimacy is hot in an awkward way that includes a lot of experimentation and giggling.

I am writing this review considerably after reading the book. This comes with pros and cons. The Con is that I can’t remember many details. The pro is that I have not just my first impression of the book, but a sense of what it has left me with. Every time I think of this book, I smile. Dear readers, I regret that I have forgotten so many of the finer points of the book. However, I can promise you that it will leave you smiling.

At this point we’ve reviewed so many Courtney Milan books on this site that the reviews are kind of a foregone conclusion – you know the book is going to get a good grade, the question is just – how good? My answer for The Marquis Who Mustn’t is: Very Good, especially if you are in the mood for pure heartwarming material. Evil is vanquished. Wrongs are righted. Apologies are made. And of course, love wins.

What I appreciate most about Courtney Milan is that she makes every book fresh. Common themes run through her work but I never feel like I’m reading the same thing with a new cover. Milan always provides something new for the reader to geek out over. In this book, it’s pottery. In the last book, it was brown sauce, something I didn’t know I could geek out over (but I totally did).There’s also always layers and layers of character development in her books. In this case, I expected a powerful romance. I did not expect an even more powerful depiction of a mother/daughter relationship that moved me right down to my core.

Aside from the relationships that the protagonists, Naomi and Kai, have with their relatives and their fellow villagers, my favorite aspect of this romance is that Naomi and Kai are not interested in changing one another, and they have a kind of trust mingled with boundaries that one rarely sees in fiction or in life. In many cases as the plot progresses, something is set up to be a dealbreaker, but when the protagonists encounter these potential deal breakers they tend to react with, “OK, I accept this new thing I’ve learned about you, and I will incorporate it into my life under my terms.” It leads to a fascinating dynamic and loads of interesting and moving character growth.

No one who reads Milan, or this site, will be surprised to see an A grade here. If this is your first Milan, I’d suggest starting with the first Wedgeford Trial book, The Duke Who Didn’t. However, The Marquis Who Mustn’t is a solid stand alone. It’s a great romance, it involves people who solve problems creatively and in interesting and unexpected ways, it has history and art, it has complicated family dynamics, it explores historical diversity in England, and, as I mentioned a long time ago in this sentence, it has a whopping good love story. Full squee for this installment in a long line of squee-worthy books.

Blurb: He clawed his way up from the gutters of St. Giles to the top of a shadowy empire. Feared and fearsome, battered and brilliant, nothing shocks Lorcan St. Leger—not even the discovery of an aristocratic woman escaping out a window near the London docks on the eve of the storm of the decade. They find shelter at a boarding house called the Grand Palace on the Thames—only to find greater dangers await inside.

Desperate, destitute, and jilted, Lady Daphne Worth knows the clock is ticking on her last chance to save herself and her family: an offer of a loveless marriage. But while the storm rages and roads flood, she and the rogue who rescued her must pose as husband and wife in order to share the only available suite.

Crackling enmity gives way to incendiary desire—and certain heartbreak: Lorcan is everything she never dreamed she’d wanted, but he can never be what she needs. But risk is child’s play to St. Leger. And if the stakes are a lifetime of loving and being loved by Daphne, he’ll move any mountain, confront any old nemesis, to turn “never” into forever.

This is book six in the Palace of Rogues series; I’ve read five books in the series (all but book three, I’m Only Wicked with You). I read four of these books last year, starting with book four, After Dark with the Duke, which remains my favorite (it was a B+, almost A range – the grade went down a bit because the ending was weak, I thought).

On to How to Tame a Wild Rogue:

Lorcan comes upon Daphne as she’s escaping the unwanted attentions of her employer’s husband by climbing out a second-floor window. He rescues her and they end up traveling a short way to the Grand Palace on the Thames together to seek refuge from the coming storm. They are assumed to be a married couple, a fiction they maintain for…reasons.

The hero of an earlier book in the series (and the husband of one of the two female proprietors of The Grand Palace on the Thames) objects to them staying when he recognizes Lorcan. Captain Tristan Hardy is a former Navy man who was tasked with catching smugglers. Guess what Lorcan’s former profession was? This causes some interesting tension between Tristan and his wife, Delilah, as she bristles at him dictating who she can accept at her boardinghouse. It turns out that Delilah actually knows Daphne from her former life and remembers Daphne as kind as well as respectable. After some tense moments, Lorcan and Daphne are granted use of a suite in TGPotT (I can’t keep typing that name out). They figure they’ll stay and maintain the façade until the storm blows over and they can go their separate ways.

Of course, it doesn’t quite work out that way. The enforced closeness leads to the couple learning about each other’s lives. Lorcan grew up dirt poor in St. Giles, with a mother that died when he was very young and an abusive father who died when he was 10. He’s had to make his own way in the world, and he’s hardened by his experiences.

Daphne has suffered as well, albeit in a more genteel manner. Her mother died when she was young and her selfish father allowed Daphne to take over management of the house and finances, the latter of which were reduced by his gambling habit. Daphne was jilted by her fiancé, who fell in love with a governess. As the book starts she is reduced to being a lady’s companion to earn some money to keep her father and brothers afloat. Her life has not turned out as she once hoped, and she is genuinely unhappy and lonely in a rather low-key, repressed way.

There’s a fair amount – not too much, but maybe almost too much – of revisiting the couples from the first two books (Tristan/Delilah, and Angelique/Lucien). It makes sense, I guess, since they are the proprietors of TGPotT, and thus on the scene quite a bit. There are tensions caused in part by a missing ship that should have arrived at port weeks before. It’s owned by Tristan, Lucien and Mr. Delacorte, a permanent resident of TGPotT, and if it has gone down at sea, their company, the Triton Group, is in financial trouble.

How to Tame a Wild Rogue opened strong, I thought. I enjoyed the set up – a raging storm that isolates the hero and heroine as well as the other denizens of the Grand Palace on the Thames.

There’s some comic relief offered by the other guests, particularly three German musicians who are excessively jolly and seem determined to eat every crumb of food TGPotT has to offer.

As for the hero and heroine, I liked Daphne more than Lorcan. He just felt very bland to me – how many self-made, London-slum-bred semi-pirates have I read about at this point? A lot, that’s how many. There was little about him that stood out or made him come alive for me. Daphne is a familiar type as well – the dutiful spinster – but she had a poignant quality about her that made me root for her happiness.

I really do like the conceit of the Grand Palace on the Thames – lonely people discovering a home and sometimes a found family in an unusual place. I wish the characters in most of the books were as interesting to me as the unusual setting. My grade for this one is a B-/C+.

Best,

Jennie

AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle

Nick Russo has worked his way from a rough Brooklyn neighborhood to a reporting job at one of the city’s biggest newspapers. But the late 1950s are a hostile time for gay men, and Nick knows that he can’t let anyone into his life. He just never counted on meeting someone as impossible to say no to as Andy.

Andy Fleming’s newspaper-tycoon father wants him to take over the family business. Andy, though, has no intention of running the paper. He’s barely able to run his life–he’s never paid a bill on time, routinely gets lost on the way to work, and would rather gouge out his own eyes than deal with office politics. Andy agrees to work for a year in the newsroom, knowing he’ll make an ass of himself and hate every second of it.

Except, Nick Russo keeps rescuing Andy: showing him the ropes, tracking down his keys, freeing his tie when it gets stuck in the ancient filing cabinets. Their unlikely friendship soon sharpens into feelings they can’t deny. But what feels possible in secret–this fragile, tender thing between them–seems doomed in the light of day. Now Nick and Andy have to decide if, for the first time, they’re willing to fight.

Review:

Dear Cat Sebastian,

I have read many of your works and by now I have no doubt that I find your books set in the 20 century more enjoyable than the 19 century ones. This book was lovely. It is mostly a character study written with such a delicate touch of two people who, to put it simply, belong together but at the beginning neither of them quite know it.

Nick has some feelings for Andy almost from the beginning. I think the beginning of the story should clue you in that nobody is hating anyone in this book:

“Nick Russo could fill the Sunday paper with reasons why he shouldn’t be able to stand Andy Fleming. Not only is he the boss’s son, but rumor has it he’s only slumming it at the New York Chronicle city desk — a job Nick has been hungry for ever since he first held a newspaper in his hands — because his father threatened to cut off his allowance. He can’t type. He roots for the Red Sox. He has no idea how to buy subway tokens. He has this stupid habit of biting his nails and then, realizing what he’s doing, abruptly stopping and looking around furtively to check if anyone saw him.

He blushes approximately five hundred times a day. He has a cluster of tiny freckles at the corner of his mouth shaped like a copy editor’s caret and, since Nick can’t stop looking at them, those freckles are going to ruin his career. With covert glances across the newsroom, Nick catalogs all the things he doesn’t like about Andy and stores them up like a misanthropic squirrel. He’s Nick’s age, twenty-five or so, but has definitely never done an honest day’s work in his life, probably not even a dishonest day’s.

He’s gangly, not short, but maybe a buck thirty soaking wet. His hair is that in-between color that on women gets called dishwater blond and on men isn’t called anything at all because it usually looks brown after being slicked back or combed smooth. But Andy doesn’t slick his hair back. He parts it on the side like a six-year-old. Nick doesn’t bother with any of that garbage, either, but that’s only because his hair is curly and has ideas of its own. Nick’s hair laughs in the face of pomade. It’s offensive, is what it is, that the boss’s son thinks he’s going to play at being a cub reporter. It’s possibly even more offensive than the story behind how Nick got the job, which owes more to the old city desk editor going senile than anything else, but Nick isn’t going to think about that right now.

The point is, Nick knows how to hate people. He’s no stranger to a grudge. He ought to spend the rest of his career resenting the ever-living daylights out of Andy. Instead he lasts less than a week. Less than a day, even. About forty-five minutes, to be exact, and that’s Andy’s fault, too. *”

And yes, the book is written in the present time first person switching between Nick and Andy. And normally it is not my favorite POV, but it worked very well for me here. Probably because it felt as if the main focus of the story was Nick and Andy learning things about themselves in the present time and their relationship was evolving in front of us. I thought it was a good choice for this particular story.

I was fascinated by the promise of seeing how journalists worked in the 1950s and we see some of that for sure, I am not lowering the grade for that of course, since I always try to evaluate the story I am reading and not the one I was expecting but I think I am allowed to wish for more, to see more scenes in the actual newspaper and them working.

Again though, the plot here was mostly very character based and everything revolved around Nick and Andy figuring stuff out, realizing that they are able to find the way to be together, how they feel about each other, what they want from their careers, I was especially pleased how Andy figured out that he could run the newspaper despite his many worries. Nick may not have made drastic changes about his career, but he also made some and I was proud of him, too.

We also got to see Andy’s relationship with his father changing for the better and some stuff with Nick and his family. It all felt so, I don’t know what is the best word here? Organic I guess?

There are also touches of humor and it worked well for me. There is my beloved New York on the pages of the story.

Most importantly I absolutely believed that Nick and Andy were it for each other by the time book ended.

Recommended

4.5 stars

AmazonBNKoboBook DepositoryGoogle

Never Cross A Highlander has a one-click cover. Black Highlander stories are rare, and I’m glad this one offered some of the adventure and steam that dreamy cover promised. The book is slow in the middle, but there are swordfights, forced proximity while camping, sex by a waterfall, a hellion heroine, and a hard-headed hero who needed his family to tell him that he was in love.

Here’s the book’s description:

Ailsa Connery has waited three long years to finally escape her enslavement at Stirling Castle and reunite with her clan. But her carefully laid plans are completely destroyed by the arrival of the infamous Highland warrior known as Dubh Mahoun, the Black Devil…who has plans of his own.

Kallum MacNeill’s fearsome reputation has long allowed him to keep hidden his secret double life of freeing enslaved captives across the land. It’s only when he kidnaps a servant lass—quite by accident—that he finds himself facing a wee predicament. He must accompany the lass home or risk her exposing his true identity. It’d be easy enough…if the feisty hellion didn’t fight him at every turn.

As they make their way to the Highlands, the perils the two must face are surpassed only by their constant sparring. Soon, their heated sniping sparks heat of a totally different kind. The kind that ignites a hunger that could consume them both. Yet the difficult journey is no match for the dangerous secrets they’re about to uncover.

When it comes to reading slavery-adjacent historical romances, I find myself automatically ranking how central the horror of slavery is to the storyline to help me decide what type of story will fit my mood. I usually categorize books by their similarity to my favorite Alyssa Cole historicals. I call this my Alyssa Cole Anti-Slavery Book scale, which is obviously in no way endorsed by Cole:

A Hope Divided – So we’re basically constantly under threat. If slavery wasn’t bad enough, now there’s a prison
An Extraordinary Union – Shut up and kiss me, we’ve got an institutionalized system of racial oppression to take down
An Unconditional Freedom – Trauma in the past, Healing and Badassery in the present
Agnes Moor’s Wild Knight Scot – This is some bullshit…oh wait we’re in love

I would probably place Never Cross A Highlander somewhere between An Extraordinary Union and An Unconditional Freedom on my ACAB scale. Most of the trauma the main characters experience is obliquely referenced or in the past, and they have several badass moments of fighting for the heroine’s freedom.

I loved the way the book imagines what life would be like for someone who was both of African descent and a Highlander. Ailsa is the granddaughter of escaped slaves who were grudgingly welcomed into the Connery clan. She’s spent her life loving her clan but hurt at never being fully accepted because her mother was unmarried. Kallum’s mother was a Yoruba speaker who arrived at a Highland clan already pregnant. He was raised by her and his loving adoptive family, the lairds of his clan. Kallum and Ailsa weave together pride for both heritages, a shared experience of discrimination against Highlanders and Black people, and a weariness at always being seen differently. This is doubly so for Ailsa, because she doesn’t fit in with the African slaves in the royal household at the beginning of the book, and is later seen as an outsider in Kallum’s clan. Their personalities and experiences are complementary, and I was rooting for them to realize that they were perfect together.

I don’t tend to love alphas, but Kallum was a sweetheart. He’s an honorable grumpypants who is used to women wanting him, which means we get to see Ailsa competently smack his arrogance down. Kallum recognizes her strength early on and openly appreciates it, calling her a “brave Highland lass” and trusting that she can hold her own in a fight. The climax of the book lets both of them shine as they fight to protect their families and their clan.

I appreciated that this book minimizes on-page violence towards women. At the beginning, Ailsa is nearing the end of her enslavement. She’s had a tough time, but it hasn’t broken her spirit as she sneaks out to see the clans perform for the king and plots her escape. We know Ailsa was punished later because Kellum sees her bruised face but we don’t experience it with her. There’s also a brief attempted rape scene, which I could have done without, personally, and another that’s referenced but off the page. On a scale where any book in the Outlander series is a 10, and a fluffy kitten video is a 0, I would give the first scene a trauma rating of 5.

What didn’t always work for me was the book’s pacing. I was sucked into the beginning of the story as Ailsa planned her escape, but once she and Kallum hit the road the story dragged a bit. For example, Kallum kept saying there’s a lot of urgency to meet his anti-slavery compatriots before they’re caught, but he and Ailsa kept stopping to argue, er chat. While bandits were on the way. OH-KAY.

Things picked up briefly once they reunited with Kallum’s family while on the run, slumped again while they waited to decide what to do next, and then finished with an epic ending that made me cheer. I was glad to spend time with Kallum’s matchmaking and meddlesome family in the middle of the book, and I adored his hot-tempered cousin who is just begging for a book two. I only wish the story had moved more quickly towards solidifying Ailsa’s freedom. The adventure parts of the story were exciting and fun and I loved the scenes with Ailsa and Kallum’s families. I just wanted better balance with the quieter parts.

I found myself putting the book down a few times to read something else. Partly this was pacing, partly it was the density of the writing. Never Cross a Highlander is meticulously well-researched, which I felt in everything from the many words used for genitals to the inclusion of a Black trumpeter at court who was inspired by a real 16th century trumpet player. I thought the history added depth to the story, and it never felt superfluous, but readers looking for a breezy superficial read may be surprised.

Ultimately, Never Cross a Highlander gave me what I want from a summertime historical romance read: characters I was curious about, enough adventure to keep me guessing but not so much that I started stressing, solid sexual tension, and some new-to-me history facts without having to break open a nonfiction book. However, the uneven pace kept this meandering story from being a non-stop page turner.