Highland Rebel: A Tale Of A Rebellious Lady And A Traitorous Lord (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
I've never read anything by this author before so I wasn't certain what to expect going in. I was intrigued and interested in the first third of the book which has Catherine Drummond riding down into a battlefield to save her stupid brother's hide. She gets captured for her trouble and for no reason that I can see, a mercenary/gentleman (can you be both?) snatches her up and marries her on the spot to save her from gang rape and torture death. Well, that was exciting, wasn't it? Then Catherine escapes and Jamie follows her, hellbent on dragging her back to London to get an immediate annulment. It's his turn to get caught, however, and he's tortured by her clansmen who don't know who he is, they just think he's a spy.Cat secretly saves him, nurses him back to health, and just before he's able to club her on the head and take her back to London, SHE kicks HIS ass out of the Highlands! Game on! Except....it wasn't. This book suffers from two things that can sometimes work but here just doesn't do the story justice at all. The first problem is pacing. After Cat gives Jamie the boot it's almost a full year before they see each other again and we really get not much of an indication about what either of them has been doing in all that time. The only thing we really do know is that neither one of them spends a whole lot of time thinking about the other. Not a solid foundation for a romance, but okay.A year after Jamie has left, Catherine has milked her I-have-a-husband-who-nobody-has-ever-laid-eyes-on-so-you-can't-marry-me-off-for-political-reasons story for as long as she can and her brother, cousin, and uncle have had enough. She either needs to get an annulment or kill her English husband and marry someone from another clan to build an alliance. So she heads off to London to seek an end to her marriage.And here's where the book suffers from being, well, boring, honestly. It's all court intrigue, without any actual intrigue, just people glaring at her because she's tall (I didn't make that up). Jamie and Cat have a grand time pretending they're madly in love, which in romance novels is a pretty overused trope to set up people who "pretend until they aren't pretending anymore." Except they really are pretending. And they never fall for each other. Then there's this odd sort of 9 and half weeks episode where Jamie dresses her up as a man and takes her to whorehouses, etc, where he meets with shady people who never amount to anything, story-wise. He's supposedly a spy but apparently a really crappy one and it never adds to the plot. Does the trip to the brothel where Cat sees a woman giving a BJ in public spark any kind of sexual interest in her husband? A little but when she asks him to kiss her, he rejects her and goes to look for a suitable mistress, then the book does that thing it does where it just skips ahead. "Four months later....." Four months later Jamie and Cat technically live in the same house but neither ever see each other and Cat has taken to dressing up like a man and visiting whorehouses by herself for no real reason other than she's bored and there she accidentally runs into her husband, who lectures her on the dangers of going out alone. At this point he tells her that he's not slept with anyone since she came to London (even though they ran into each other at a whorehouse) but look, we're talking about a guy who got a BJ from red-headed twins (TWINS!) the day after Catherine sent him packing from the Highlands. This guy has slept with half of London. So do I really buy this celibate story? Not really. James is just changing his personality, temporarily, to fit the story. Grrr.And this is the second problem of the book that I mentioned before. These people don't know who they are. And not in an angsty kind of "What am I going to do with the rest of my life? What do I WANT?" kind of way, just in an "Well I need this character to do this for the plot so even though I've set him up as a ruthless playboy with so many lovers that taking off his shoes to count them wouldn't really help, I'll just write him as celibate for these last FOUR MONTHS, because that's how the story is." It's jarring and it makes the characters seem weak.Catherine was raised as a boy for much of her life, learning politics and riding and sword play which is convenient for the opening scene where she gets taken as a prisoner of war, but then she spends a year in London doing NOTHING. Just nothing at all. Or nothing that we see, anyway. She's supposed to be there to get the King of England to agree to a lucrative trade deal for her clan (as well as get a divorce) but we never see this negotiating. We never see Cat doing anything useful or interesting, just going to plays, making observations about court life, and dressing up as a man for no real purpose.And Cat doesn't know what she wants. Does she want to travel? Does she want to return to the Highlands? Does she want to confront her family who have turned her back on her? All she ever wanted was to be chief and since she can't have that she doesn't know what to do, nor does she even really seem to care. I mean, she doesn't spend that much time thinking about it at all. She doesn't want Jamie, either. Not really. Even when she's drunk and begging him to kiss her, it's only because she's curious about marital relations. She doesn't think about him at all any other time.Overall, the middle part set in London makes the story drag so much that I almost gave up and stopped reading. It was just painful slogging. Romance novels have only two avenues open to them for building an actual romance, either the couple in question spend time together as friends and develop feelings for each other OR they are immediately taken with other, filled with passion that can never be denied. This book does neither. It lacks passion. And it doesn't even need to be passion for each other. If Jamie and Cat felt passionately about other things in life and somehow ended up being passionate about each other, okay then, but that never happens. They don't feel passionate about ANYTHING, least of all each other, and so I have to say that the one thing missing in this romance novel is...romance.I love a good friends-to-lovers-story but even well beyond the book's halfway point, Jamie and Cat are more housemates than anything resembling friends, spouses, or lovers.Remember when I said Jamie was the worst spy in England? Yeah. So he gets caught and is exiled. And then at that point, because Cat insists on going with him, he'd trapped in a carriage with her for a while and decides what the hell, why not kiss my wife? It's kind of a downer that the only time Jamie is ever really interested in Cat is when he doesn't have any other options. His home is gone, so are most of his lands, and now no one in England will give him the time of day. "Pucker up, baby. You're literally the last woman on Earth now." I'm swooning. I promise.Cat and Jamie start their 'marriage' in a cave and in the last third of the book it's a road trip taking place in abandoned shacks on the way to his castle in Ireland. Honestly, it would have been a much more interesting story if the London part (which takes up 200 pages!) was just left out altogether and Cat and Jamie had to flee the highlands so Jamie wouldn't be killed. According to the book, from the very beginning Cat and Jamie couldn't be married AND stay in Cat's homeland because Jamie isn't a Highlander and her family would kill him in order to marry her off to a more suitable laird. They were always going to have to run, so why not just write a book about that, where a romance could develop naturally from being forced to spend time together and get to know each other? This London crap where they live in the same house but never, ever run into each other except at parties and whorehouses just weighs the book down.But then just when you think, Finally!, they're together in the same room, they're going to start talking, Jamie gives her the "I don't want to lose your friendship" speech. ARE YOU KIDDING ME?! In an HISTORICAL NOVEL I get the "You're the best friend I've ever had and I don't want to have sex and mess it up." And then, as if this book couldn't be more of a contemporary story anachronistically set in a time of Kings, Lairds, clans, and dowries, the happy couple attempt a "Friends with Benefits" Arrangement wherein Jamie teaches her all about sex but she's never allowed to talk about her feelings for him. So of course she screws that up and and says "I love you." And of course he's irritated by it.Finally, for reasons that are never explained, mercenary, sword-for-hire, religion-swapping, fence-sitter Jamie suddenly decides to leave and go fight against King James because it's 'the right thing to do'. Cat's got enough money that they could live out their days rivaling the decadence of the King, but Jamie would rather fight for a worthy cause, which he's never done before so why not have him act out of character yet again? Oh yeah, so there can be 'tension'. Have I mentioned how much I hate people acting out of character just to move the plot along?So he leaves, without telling Cat where or when or how long he'll be. She follows him to an inn, catches him with a whore on his lap, and instead of apologizing or speaking to her really at all, he just heads upstairs. And Cat heads back to her clan, leaving her lawyers to sort out a divorce.And then, as is per usual, we flash forward another four months where we see nothing about what's been going on with Jamie and Cat except Jamie gave up the fighting, came home to find Cat gone, and then...did nothing. He never went after her. He just didn't do anything at all until he hears of a Highland insurrection and somehow manages to get north and find Cat when she's overcome in battle (for the second time) and he has to rescue her from the river.Can I just say how annoying it is to hear all this TALK of Cat being raised as a man, Cat being better than any man at anything, and then any time we actually get a chance to SEE her in action, she fucks up and needs to be rescued? Make her awesome and show her being awesome. Make her mediocre and show her being mediocre. Make her suck and show her sucking. But for the love of GOD stop telling me how great she is and then showing me she sucks. It's just frustrating and doesn't jibe with everything the author is telling us so far about this character.It's like Judith James WANTED to tell a kick-ass feminist story, but then lacked the guts to actually MAKE the heroine kick ass. I hate it when people half-ass their stories. Even if Cat couldn't fight that well, you'd think her people, the ones that begged her come back, that begged her to lead them in battle, would, you know, protect her. Joan of Arc never got her ass kicked this much and Lord knows she couldn't actually FIGHT worth a damn. All it is, is a plot device to get Jamie and Cat together because God forbid either one of them just looked at the other and said, "Hey, we need to talk."So Jamie rescues her and takes her back to her people and she tries to convince them to accept him as her husband but they refuse. Mostly because 24 hours ago he was fighting on the wrong side and killing a bunch of her clansmen, so there's that. And also her people want to continue fighting and Cat wants to stop.And so it ends like all romances with strong, capable (sort of) women must end: She gives up everything she said at the beginning of the novel she wanted: To be chief of her clan, to find Jamie. She just runs away, homeless, and Jamie, through lovely character bending at the last second decides the people he's been taking care of his whole adult life (the Sullivan family) don't really care about him so he abandons them. And they live HEA. On the road. Homeless. With nothing. The End.This is one of those books where the blurb on the back puts you in mind of a very different story than what you actually get and that's probably partly the reason I didn't like it. With much being made on the back cover of Cat's family ties, land rights, and money and Jamie's mercenary ways and lack of loyalty to anyone, I really thought I'd be reading about a guy who impulsively marries a woman on a battlefield and then follows her to her home where he finally finds the love, family, and bonds of loyalty that he wasn't able to have before because of his pre-requisite DARK PAST, whatever that would be.But what I got was a guy who married a girl for no reason other than he was bored, tried to get an annulment immediately, screwed every available woman in London when he couldn't get rid of his wife, agreed to temporarily act like he loved his wife in public for money, then abandoned her on a whim, TWICE.Too much of this book was boring as hell. Too much of it was focused on all the wrong things. Too many times character's personalities changed for the sake of the story and then back again when it was no longer convenient to the plot for them to act that way. The tone was all over the place. There was never a sense of urgency about anything, ever. I will say the banter was some of the best I've ever read, but it never led anywhere.Run away from this novel. Run. Every now and then I need a book that is a total break from life around me. A trip back to the late 17th century England, during the short reign of King James, suited me fine.Jamie Sinclair works for the King, as he did King Charles II before him. While he serves as a mercenary, he also collects information from a variety of sources (read spies) which he then shares/disseminates as he sees fit. When in Scotland overseeing some of James troops, he witnesses the not unusual rough treatment of a prisoner. Realizing that the it's a woman, he knows her fate will be unkind, and he steps in to protect her. For some un-explicable reason, he determines that the best way to protect her is to marry her on the spot. He doesn't even know who she is, though he suspects she is a camp follower, yet he tells the troops that she is a heiress who could be ransomed back to her wealthy family.Catherine Drummond was out to save her mis-guided younger brother. Unwittingly she is separated from her clan during a skirmish. She knows what her fate will be as a female prisoner of war, but she is not prepared nor accepting that this huge English man actually wants to help her.That's about all I can tell you without giving away too much. Tempting isn't it.Interesting time in British history. Catholics versus Protestants. Not only did this divide communities, but it also families. Charles II being Protestant and his successor and brother James being Catholic. To swear fealty to one king and then months or years later, swearing to uphold the next, often meant a change in religion. Jamie had to find a way to deal with this if he wanted to continue to support himself.I was most interested in the discussion of the coffee houses that proliferated across the London. I had heard of them, but not an explanation of how they fit in with society. They were widely referred to as 'Penny Universities', a penny being the cost of admission. Once inside, social class was irrelevant when it came to discussion. All present were welcome to join in whether he be a titled man or a street vendor. Fascinating.I thoroughly enjoyed this diverting story. It introduced me to a period in history that I know very little about. I really must learn more about these social class crossing coffee houses.
What do You think about Highland Rebel: A Tale Of A Rebellious Lady And A Traitorous Lord (2009)?
The only thing I really didn't like about the book was that he went from highlander to englishman.
—sham0152
I loved her book Broken Wing! I am glad she has a new release coming.
—Courtneyyyy
I enjoyed reading this book. I give 4 stars. I would recommend.
—Bonnie
