Lightning Review

Ten Days with a Highlander by Hayson Manning

B-

Ten Days with the Highlander

by Hayson Manning

Ten Days with a Highlander is a good pick if you want a quick read with some top notch sexy banter. There are some elements, though, that lacked convincing emotional depth.

Georgia Paxton has ten days to convince grumpy Callum MacGregor that his quaint, Scottish hotel would benefit from joining the Airbnb-esque company she works for. Callum isn’t a fan of change and is worried that increasing awareness would cause an increase in tourism, which would then overrun his small little village and ruin everything. Of course, Georgia wins all the locals over and Callum gets crankier and crankier.

At times, I felt like I missed a chunk of time with the way things jumped around or progressed emotionally. For example, Georgia is incredibly confident in her career and the success she’s accomplished. Good for her! But by the end, she does a complete 180 and realizes that traveling the globe looking for hotel acquisitions feeds into her feelings of never belonging. It comes out of nowhere, as there are no earlier stirrings of job uncertainty from Georgia.

It’s a short read, but still rather charming. Also, Georgia doesn’t seem to know what a landline is and she’s not much younger than I am. What.

Amanda

Go-getter Georgia Paxton has ten days to acquire a quaint hotel in the Scottish Highlands for her travel accommodation company before she’s off on her next grand adventure. Too bad the sexy, broody Scot who owns the place is dead against the idea…and that she’s in very real danger of losing their little bet to see who can convince whom first.

There’s no way Callum MacGregor is going to let the gorgeous American turn his tiny hometown over to bored tourists looking to satisfy their Outlander fantasies. He only has ten days to convince her to slow down and see the magic of the town and its people. If he succeeds, he won’t have to run her out of the county. But if he fails, Georgia might run off with his heart.

Contemporary Romance, Romance
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  1. TMary says:

    I have a question about this book, and I really, really hope the answer isn’t yes, because then I’ll be very upset and we might get a full-blown rant, and I don’t really want to rant at you nice people, but there is an issue here that I feel is being a little ignored.

    Does the happy ending show that Georgia was absolutely right in wanting Callum to turn over his hotel to her Airbnb-esque company?

  2. Amanda says:

    @TMary: I actually think there’s a lovely compromise to the ending. I’ll put it in the spoiler below.

    Show Spoiler
    Callum seems to be the only one who hates Georgia’s idea, wanting to preserve the Scottish village. However, other residents see huge benefits in Georgia’s ideas and think an increase in tourism could really help their small businesses.

    At the end, Georgia quits the company she works for, finally finding a sense of home with Callum and the village. His hotel doesn’t get taken over by a corporation looking to turn it into some boutique nightmare. But changes are made with Georgia at the helm, given her background in these sorts of things. She updates the rooms, plumbing, and wi-fi. She also helps the local business with digital marketing and e-commerce.

    Does that help? Happy to clarify more!

  3. TMary says:

    Hi Amanda, first off, I’m so sorry this reply took me so long! I really wanted to stop and think about the subject and see what my feelings were, and here they are (this is going to be a long comment, apologies again):

    Thank you for the clarification, and that does make it better than what I was imagining. But here’s the thing: The Highlands and Islands, or the Gàidhealteachd, are in a housing crisis. Not that there aren’t enough houses, but that the preponderance of summer home and temporary residence ownerss have driven up the prices artificially, and now the young people of the area very often cannot find affordable housing. They cannot stay and bring up their families. This has very serious consequences beyond just “these people cannot stay in the place they grew up”, which is bad enough; these young people are often Gaels. The Gaelic language and culture are endangered, and when people cannot live in their homeland and raise their children within the culture and language that they grew up in, it creates another rift in the community that cannot be filled.

    I’m aware this story is more about the tourism and hotel business than it is about housing, and if it brings this issue up and treats it delicately, I’m happy to hear it! But the two things are related, and the tourism industry is a double-edged sword in the Gàidhealteachd. Yes, it brings in money, and many people depend on it, but it also has a tendency to push out the native language and culture. In a country like, say, France, it doesn’t matter so much if English-speaking tourists come and go all the time, because French is a stable majority language in France. But when the language is already subsumed by English in its own country, then the added costs of accommodating English speaking tourists can be devastating.

    I don’t have all the answers, it’s a complex issue, and I’m not saying “Don’t go to Scotland or you will single-handedly kill the Gaelic language”. But there needs to be more of an awareness that this is a serious problem that is not helped by tourism. Many American tourists are not even aware that Gaelic is still spoken natively in Scotland, and if they are not aware of that, then they cannot be aware that drastic measures are necessary to ensure the language’s survival.

    So when I read the sentence “There’s no way Callum MacGregor is going to let the gorgeous American turn his tiny hometown over to bored tourists looking to satisfy their Outlander fantasies”, what I saw was a Gael watching his mother tongue and his culture being slowly eroded away, and furious at an American who just doesn’t get what she is doing, what she is introducing and what she is destroying. The thing that made me angry about it was that I’m not sure the author realizes that that’s what she wrote.

    I mean, I could be wrong, I haven’t read the book, and I’m happy to be proven wrong if so. But is there an acknowledgment of Gaelic as a living language and the issues it faces? Because if not, this book, to put it bluntly, is casually glossing over the culmination of centuries of oppression and persecution for the sake of a cute, quick romance novel. It is glossing over the highest suicide rates in Scotland, and possibly in the UK as well (I’m not sure about that). It is glossing over a endangered language and a vanishing culture.

    Now, if so, this is probably out of ignorance and not malice. I don’t believe that Hayson Manning intended to write anything offensive. But if you’re going to set out to write a story, you first need to understand what it is you are writing said story about. Cute, fun, fluffy romance novels have their place, and I’m not trying to harsh anybody’s buzz, but if you’re going to write one, at least try to find out whether your setting has room for a cute, fun, fluffy romance novel, or whether, perhaps, the presence of one would be insulting.

    And again, I apologize if I have jumped to any conclusions or offended anybody, but this is a subject very, very dear to my heart, and I felt the need to say something. Thanks for reading all this 🙂

  4. TMary says:

    Yikes, that came out longer than the review did! Tha mi duilich (I’m sorry)!

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