REVIEW: Highland Champion by Hannah Howell
Dear. Ms. Howell,
You wrote a really good story here but had to fling in so many dinnae, cannae, willnae, lassies that my head was spinning from all the faux Scots. DIALECT WARNING FOR READERS: If ye nae can stand reading every spoken exchange in Howell’s version of a Highland brogue, ye dinnae want to be reading this book. Aye, for tis full of it, ye ken. But, if you can tolerate this or as in my case, mentally delete most of the dinnae, cannae, shouldnae, weel words, then it’s not a half bad book. And it’s got one hot cover! Plus the hero is a red headed Highlander.
And while the book is chock full of romance and Scottish cliches (heroine is a healer, hero has a beautiful but vain and shallow woman in his past, the plot is pretty standard), you still took a few different twists that kept me entertained. I loved the fact that the hero has been a ladies man for years and decides it’s better that his heroine knows about this from the beginning. He also believes in her getting her anger about this out in the open rather than letting it fester between them. That bit was very refreshing.
There are also several secondary and tertiary characters who add color to the book and by golly you manage to put them in the book without having them take over it to rehash their past stories or set up future ones. And from the elaborate family tree at the beginning of the book, I can see you’ve done a ton of earlier stories and still has plenty of braw laddies and wee lassies to write quite a few more. I believe we’re currently on the third generation of some of these families.
I’d agree with the B grade this book got at TRR but after reading the other reviews there, I’m not ready to head out on a backlist hunt just yet. However, this book stands nicely on it’s own.
~ Jayne
*skin crawls*