Dear Ms. Graham,

I’ve been trying to read more historical romance lately, so when I was offered your book and I saw that it was a departure from the usual England as Regencylandia fare, I was happy to accept. The unusual premise (Outlander meets Last of the Mohicans) sounded promising and it looked like a modern incarnation of the epic romances that some of us really miss from the olden days. Unfortunately, there were a number of issues that made this a less than satisfying read. It straddles the romance/fiction boundary, but not always in a way that works.

The novels opens in the 1730s, when our narrator, Maggie is a child. Maggie has vivid dreams in which she sees the future, and she forms empathic connections with other people, most notably with Andrew McDonnell, a young teenage boy who lives in the Highlands of Scotland. She feels a strong bond with him, but at that point she knows nothing about him.

When Maggie is seventeen, her life of terrible experiences begins. First, her abusive, alcoholic father dies, leaving her mother and three sisters to scratch out a living on their farm. Then, when she is seventeen, white men come to their farm, shoot her mother dead and kidnap Maggie and her fifteen- and ten-year-old sisters and gang-rape them. Her youngest sister, Ruth, dies from the assault and fifteen-year-old Adelaide is severely traumatized. Maggie and Adelaide are able to escape with the psychic help of Andrew and the real-world help of some sympathetic Cherokee men, who take the girls to their village. As Maggie and Adelaide are nursed back to physical health, Maggie is befriended by Waw-Li, an old woman who also has psychic abilities, and she and her sister are incorporated into the Cherokee community. Things are relatively not-horrible for a while, but the reader should not get too comfortable.

Meanwhile, Andrew and his father and brothers are, as McDonnells, loyal to the Stuart cause and wind up at Culloden on the losing side. Andrew is separated from the others in the battle and assumes they have been killed; he is saved only because Maggie psychically assists him. He makes his way back to the family property, only to find that the English have burned the buildings and killed his mother. Andrew leaves his home and hikes through the Highlands for two months before he meets a fellow Scot, Iain McKenzie, who was also at Culloden and whose wife and children were also killed in the aftermath. Iain and Andrew join forces, walking past abandoned houses, until they find the McLeod property, untouched, where they are welcomed by the family. Andrew has decided to leave Scotland, and Iain joins him. The McLeod’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Janet, wants Andrew to marry her and take her with him, but he is committed to his vision of Maggie.

All this happens before the reader is halfway through the book.

The grimness of the stories is almost unremitting. Children are brutally assaulted and killed, as are women. White men in the Colonies and the English in Scotland are uniformly evil (although the English inexplicably fail to ransack every home they come across, leaving food and even honey in the cupboards of some Scots they kill). The Cherokee are uniformly good. Unfortunately, we don’t really get to know the Cherokee except through Maggie’s perspective. They aren’t quite ciphers, but they’re far from rounded characters, considering we spend a fair amount of time with them, and there’s a lot of exposition about Cherokee ways and beliefs. And oh yes, the one Irish character plays the fiddle.

There is a strong sense of historical place in the novel. The Scottish countryside is well described, as are the scenes in colonial America. There is a lot of Gaelic and brogue, but it didn’t bother me as much as it has in many historical romances (The “dinna fash” count is 2). Inexplicably, however, the historical verisimilitude falls apart in the last quarter of the book. Andrew, Iain, and the others accompanying them make their way to the Scottish coast, where they easily gain passage on a ship bound for Virginia. They have plenty of money to pay the fare for five people, and Andrew even gets paid for working on board the ship on the journey. Then, once they reach Virginia, they make their way to Cross Creek, North Carolina without difficulty, and from there to Charleston. Which in this book is in North Carolina. And Andrew, Iain, and Seamus (the Irish fiddler) are able to gain title to 100 acres of land in the “province of North Carolina” on the same day they arrive in Charleston (the biggest town in the South at that point) because:

the magistrate was going over petitions and, being in a cheerful mood, was handing them out like candy. The royal officials granted the land free, subject only to a small surveying and transfer fee: four shillings proclamation money per hundred acres.

And the group soon runs into Maggie, even though she has been in South Carolina for the entire book and not moved from that area.

No, no, no. North and South Carolina were different colonies (not provinces) in 1747. Charleston is in South Carolina. And even “free” land cost a lot more than four shillings in conveyance and other fees. I felt as if I’d been dumped into another book. It was so disappointing, because the historical context was the best thing about the novel up to that point.

Maggie is the most interesting character, perhaps because we spend a lot of time in her head and she is written in first person POV. Andrew is next, written in third person POV. The rest of the characters are kind of stock. The writing is serviceable but there is a lot of exposition and the dialogue is predictable. Here’s an example:

“Your dreams, your magic, your gift from the spirit world. Pah! You can make them say whatever you want. You do not want me, you blame the dreams. You are wrong about something, and you blame them, too. If you do not want to marry me, Ma-kee, you should be strong enough to say it. And if that is so, why do you kiss me and hold my hand? Why do you look at me the way you do?”

“I—” I said in a tiny voice, but stopped, having no idea where to start.

“This is what I mean,” he fumed. “You cannot answer a question without consulting your dreams. You do not know what you want. I waited for you, Ma-kee. I trusted your eyes. Do not tell me some story about your dreams. Do not treat me like an idiot. The others may listen to every word you say, but I know you.”

He disappeared into the trees, crackling twigs under his feet. I didn’t watch him go, but stared at the dead tree beside me, feeling wretched.

He was right and he was wrong. To be fair, I did listen to my dreams, and paid close attention to them. But they didn’t rule my every decision. I thought for myself and always had. The dreams only provided insight and guidance. What hurt was when he had said I didn’t know what I wanted. It hurt because in many ways he was right. I didn’t know why I allowed myself to grow close to Soquili when my heart already belonged to Wolf. I liked being with Soquili, doing what we’d been doing. Before he came along, I had never felt protected or cared for by anyone other than Wolf. I had never expected to want to touch a man after what had happened to me in the woods. I hated that I had hurt him. That he’d felt the need to strike out the way he did. I liked Soquili very much. But he had to understand I was never going to be his wife.

Maggie has been snogging poor Soquili, so it’s not surprising he’s confused. But after a while he comes around and becomes Just A Friend, indeed, such a good friend that he saves Maggie later in the story.

I’m really not sure who the audience is for this book. The hero and heroine do not meet in person until the very end, and the HEA is a given, so romance readers are likely to feel unsatisfied. If the audience is readers of historical fiction, the Carolina problems are pretty glaring, the immigration journey is something out of a pirate romance, and I’m not altogether sure about some of the bits set in Scotland (Andrew walks for months without seeing a soul, which seems unlikely to me, but I could be wrong). While the writing is perfectly adequate, it’s not a book you read for the lyrical prose. And finally, the storyline is grim, grim, grim, I’m all for gritty, but this goes way past that. Grade: C

~ Sunita

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Related posts:

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2. REVIEW: Virgin on Her Wedding Night by Lynne Graham
3. REVIEW: Ruthless Magnate, Convenient Wife by Lynne Graham

Your books are like potato chips or popcorn or anything smothered with chocolate. I can’t stop reading them anymore than I can restrict myself to one serving of a snack that’s bound to go straight to my hips and stick there like superglue. Sigh. Just when I think that you must be running out of supernatural legends or myths to bring into the Jager Sucher world, you trot out another one and write a book about it. And yes, I did google the subject of the latest paranormal beastie to bedevil your characters and also noticed a bunch of other legends listed at one site in particular. Seems like every group/clan/bunch of people have their own particular bugaboo to scare them in the dark.

After reading last years entry in your Nighcreatures series, “Hidden Moon,” I knew that Cherokee sheriff Grace McDaniel would a heroine at some point. She’s another of the “tough as nails” women you seem to specialize in and of whom I can’t get enough. But while some heroines like this end up grating on my last nerve, yours have enough of a sense of humility and poke fun at themselves enough so that I can laugh along with them.

Grace is competent at her job, willing to roll with the punches, cares about the people she’s been sworn to protect, even the drunks and rednecks, and can track almost anything that walks through the Blue Ridge Mountains near the Georgia town of Lake Bluff. Things which move right through solid objects and can fly might stump her for a little while but she soon figures out what to do about them too. I also like that she doesn’t get along with Elise Hanover (Dark Moon is one of my least favorite of this series) as I can’t stand Elise either. So sue me.

Books written in first person don’t bother me. In fact I often enjoy them quite a bit but sometimes I do miss not having the other lead character’s point of view. Since you usually have your heroine suspect her hero of being the baddie for at least a little bit of the book, I can see why you need to restrict what we the readers know but I wistfully wonder what goes on in the minds of these heroes. Ian Walker, another hero with secrets in his past, pops up in Grace’s world right when things start to go wonky and the music from “The Twilight Zone” should start sounding in her head. It doesn’t help Grace’s equilibrium that the heat between these two sizzles like the thunder which starts the story. But she is clear headed enough to order her deputy to investigate Ian’s bona fides as a doctor.

I like Ian yet I felt that some of his revelations were veering towards deus ex machina territory. I also didn’t care for Elise Hanover’s closed mouth. Yeah, I did mention I don’t like her, right? One character I was happy to see again is Doc Bill, the local ME. I bet he could entertain a lot of people at the next medical conference he attends.

Looking back at some of my previous letters, it would appear that many of the issues that annoyed me are ones which still do so I guess I just need to deal with it for future books. But then, what’s the deal with the Jager Suchers? Is this the end of this series? Or is there more to come? I couldn’t help laughing at the way Grace follows their underground actions by reading the tabloids but if it works for the MiB, then why not a small town Sheriff. From the excerpt at the end of “Thunder Moon” it seems that you’ve got a new series planned. I await it eagerly. B

~Jayne

This book can be purchased in mass market. No ebook format. Please, St. Martin, please get with the twenty first century.

Related posts:

1. REVIEW: Hidden Moon by Lori Handeland
2. REVIEW: Midnight Moon by Lori Handeland
3. REVIEW: Rising Moon by Lori Handeland