Book Review

The Laird Takes a Bride by Lisa Berne

The past month has been kind of rough in terms of the number of books I’ve DNF’d. I’ve put down two brand-new historicals in a week, so while I wasn’t thrilled with The Laird Takes a Bride, I was determined to power through it just to finish something.

The problem with The Laird Takes a Bride is that it’s an incredibly uneven novel. The first half of the book is frustrating, and while it improved considerably by the second half, there was a lot to slog through to get there.  It was so uneven it actually felt as if each half had been written by two different people.

At age twenty-seven, Fiona Douglass is a spinster and content to stay that way. Her heart was broken when the man she loved and thought would offer for her, Logan Munro, married her sister instead. So Fiona isn’t thrilled when she’s summoned to Castle Tadgh to be a potential bride to Alasdair Penhallow.

On the morning after his thirty-fifth birthday party, Alasdair is made aware of an inconvenient clan decree stating:

Any chieftain of Castle Tadgh who remains unmarried by his thirty-fifth birthday must immediately invite the eligible highborn maidens of the Eight Clans of Killaly to stay within the castle, and within thirty-five days choose one to be his bride.

Failure to comply with this is punishable by being put on a pike for thirty-five days before being buried.

Chris Pine says Well that's neat.

There are four eligible maidens available for Alasdair’s choosing, and Fiona is among them. What follows is sort of a house party (the book is set in 1811) where the women compete for Alasdair’s affection.

The problem is the other maidens were caricatures, not characters, and so poorly fleshed out and stereotyped that it was borderline offensive. We have The Delicate Princess, The Wild Child, The Social Climber, and then Fiona, who is above it all and therefore clearly Alasdair’s One True Love.

A second problem was that I didn’t particularly like Fiona. She’s industrious and a list-maker, constantly improving the situation around her, which is nice except she’s also kind of shitty about it. She’s especially unkind to her middle-aged Aunt Isobel, whom she blames for encouraging her to pursue her disastrous love affair with Logan Munro.

For the first half of the book Alasdair is just kind of there, trying to figure out why Fiona isn’t impressed with him. Then some stuff happens.

Click for spoilers!
The Wild Child dies in a riding accident and all the other women leave
.

Fiona is the only one left for Alasdair to marry.

The next part of the book is Alasdair and Fiona navigating the beginning of their marriage. He and Fiona spend a lot of time sniping and snapping at each other, and it felt like hanging out with your soon-to-be-divorced relatives at Thanksgiving.

Then, finally, finally we get some light at the end of the tunnel. A little more than halfway though the book, I started getting some backstory on Alasdair that expanded his character and made him more compelling. Then Fiona mellowed into someone I liked more. Once that happened, the book was actually enjoyable and fun to read. We even get a secondary romance between Cousin Isobel and Alasdair’s uncle that’s incredibly sweet and heartwarming.

Had Alasdair’s backstory been sprinkled in earlier in the book, it would have made him a much more interesting character and driven the plot forward in a more meaningful way. As it was, he didn’t come to life for me until halfway through the book.

Personally, I would have been fine skipping the entire 19th century Scottish The Bachelor portion of the book. The decree forcing Alasdair to choose a bride from among four women could easily have been tailored to just force him to marry Fiona instead. It’s not like it made a ton of sense to begin with. The house party portion of the novel really didn’t add anything to the plot other than annoyance, and it wasn’t until those other characters left that Fiona and Alasdair were allowed to grow.

I also didn’t like the way Fiona’s character was handled; I think she was meant to be a Cinderella archetype, but it felt off. Fiona’s father is awful, her sisters are all married, and she’s stuck at home basically taking care of things. When we see her in the competition, it’s clear she’s “The One” because she’s industrious, and always doing things for other people. Tying virtue to doing work for others has always kind of irked me, because it’s an expectation of women (especially unmarried women of the time) that they take on the burdens and troubles of their family and community in order to prove their worth. As a result, most of Fiona’s personality comes from what she does for other people, not who she actually is. She likes to knit and sew in her spare time (again for others), but most of her character amounts to “busy managing things.”

Like I said, the book does start to pick up about halfway through when Fiona and Alasdair start genuinely trying to figure each other out. Fiona starts treating Cousin Isobel with the kindness she deserves. Alasdair is given a past that makes him an actual person rather than a paper-doll Highland laird. The problem is the reader has to push through about 200 pages to get there, and I’m just not sure it’s worth it.

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The Laird Takes a Bride by Lisa Berne

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  1. Am I the only person who wonders why the hero’s last name is Penhallow when he is a Scottish Laird?
    I always thought that a surname which began with the prefix Pen was a Cornish name, Cornwall being kinda sorta at the other end of the island.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tre,_Pol_and_Pen

  2. Rebecca says:

    Am I the only person who wonders why IN 1811 there are enforceable “clan decrees” about sticking people on pikes? I know Scottish law is somewhat different from English but “different” doesn’t mean “nonexistent” and wouldn’t a modern nation-state kinda sorta consider that murder? The 19th C went to considerable lengths to stamp out duelling, and that was fast and furtive. No way a thirty-five day public execution wouldn’t attract attention from the authorities. Wouldn’t Alasdair just have to go to the nearest magistrate (possibly himself or a hunting buddy) and lay a charge against whoever threatened him?

  3. hng23 says:

    Welp, that’s one book removed from my tbr list. Thanks for the heads up.

  4. Emily C says:

    Aww, that’s unfortunate because the first book- You May Kiss the Bride- was one of my favorite reads this summer. Thanks for slogging through and taking one for the team, Elyse!

  5. Msb says:

    Right on, Elyse. The last thing we need is the resurrection of the Angel in the House.

  6. Gloriamarie says:

    I’ve said it before, I’m sure I’ll say it again. Is there some rule which requires the hero to be half-naked outside? Because I’ve been to Scotland and even in mid-summer it’s too cold to run around like that.

    This kind of cover has become cliché.

  7. Maite says:

    Might give this one a try. I am curious as to how the author redeemed such an offensively stereotypical book.

    Won’t be anywhere in the near future, because the name Fiona reminds me of a certain trigger-happy, ass-kicking character in a totally different story. (Anyone else here watch Burn Notice?)

  8. Karen H near Tampa says:

    From the other side, I’m more than fine with the hero being half-naked, wherever he is. As I’ve said before, besides admiring all those lovely muscles, I know that they generate heat so he’s probably not as uncomfortable as most women would be in that situation. I’m much more tired of seeing the heroine half-naked, especially in a time-period-inappropriate strapless prom dress (although this cover is not nearly as bad as many I’ve seen).

    So, as usual, different strokes for different folks.

  9. Rose says:

    What spectacular Chris Pine usage there, Elyse. You truly have the gift of GIFing.

    Obviously he’s can be half-naked because his ~passion~ is keeping both of them toasty. It even seems to be powerful enough to blow her hair artfully about.

    We’ve got find a speedy acronym to thank you for taking one for the team, because I seem to write that a lot. Many Awesome Needed Thoughts, I Totally Thank You. MANTITTY.

  10. Stefanie Magura says:

    @Maite:

    I watched Burn Notice with my parents, and Fiona was indeed memorable. Also memorable, was Fiona from the Tea Rose Series whose first book is the title book.

  11. T says:

    Also disgruntled by the ridiculousness of ‘Penhallow’ as a Scottish name. (But then, I once read a romance with a Regency-era English Jennifer when I had to construct an imaginary West Country grandmother for her to explain why she’d been given a very rare, strange Cornish first name rather than being called JANE.) Even after Poldark, I think that writers frequently don’t understand how distinctive Cornwall was from the rest of England for a very long time.

  12. Gloriamarie says:

    @Karen H , you miss my point. I don’t object to half-naked men as a rule. I object to the cliche that every book about a Scotsman requires a half-naked man in a kilt. It is overdone, it is ridiculous that every cover is basically the same. Show no creativity and ultimately is insulting to us readers.

  13. Louise says:

    Any chieftain of Castle Tadgh who remains unmarried by his thirty-fifth birthday must immediately invite the eligible highborn maidens of the Eight Clans of Killaly to stay within the castle, and within thirty-five days choose one to be his bride.
    Shed light, please. Are all those eligible highborn maidens required to accept his invitation to the castle–and subsequently to accept his proposal, if forthcoming? What are the age limits? What does “eligible” mean? Unmarried, unbetrothed, not a nun? Does “maiden” mean that widows, even if childless and attractive, are off the hook?

    To take @Rebecca’s query one step further: Does Scottish clan law in 1811 extend to women who are by definition not clan members? Or is it that the Eight Clans all share one reciprocal rule? Or–depressing but all-too-likely possibility–the author takes it for granted, and assumes the reader will too, that any as-yet-unmarried highborn maiden will simply leap at the chance to snag the Laird … even though nobody else has yet done so.

    So many questions, so little time …

  14. Caitlin says:

    I read this and I 100% concur with this review. It is such a mess of a book. Am also disgruntled by the name “Penhallow.” Not saying that Cornish folks weren’t in Scotland, but c’mon.

  15. Lisa F says:

    I ended up giving this one a D; I concur with the review but I felt like it never recovered from the groaner of a plot twist that came before Alesdair and Fiona’s late-book temporary separation that undoes the clan decree stuff, or from the fact that Fiona was obsessed with Logan lasts all the way to her wedding night.

    Ditto everyone talking about the clan law thing happening that late in the 1800s. I would’ve accepted the 12’s or 13’s but not just before the war of 1812!

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