A
Genre: Historical: European, Romance
Theme: Mistaken/False Identity, Fake Relationship
Archetype: Military
Everything about When a Scot Ties the Knot by Tessa Dare worked for me. Everything. Bust out the squee mop, y’all because this review is just going to be a flappy-hands Good Book Noise® mess.
Things this book has:
1. A sexy Scot hero I pictured as Sam Heughan.
2. A heroine who is a naturalist and illustrator.
3. Tons of UST.
4. A completely crazy sauce plot that Dare pulls off flawlessly.
5. A missing lobster.
No lobsters were harmed in this book.
Madeline Gracechurch, our heroine, is a shy young woman who suffers from social anxiety. As a result, the thought of facing her first season in London is unbearable to her. As an introvert I can so relate. In a poorly thought out plan to avoid her season, Madeline pretends to have met a handsome soldier while her father was on his honeymoon with her new stepmother, and tells everyone she’s already engaged. Thus the myth of Captain Logan MacKenzie is born.
In order to sell the ruse, Maddie writes to her dear Captain MacKenzie and throws her letters in the post fully expecting them to wind up in a dead letters office (Hey! It’s Bartleby the Scrivener!). The letters function more as a diary then anything allowing Maddie to share her personal thoughts with her fictional suitor.
Maddie’s true passion is drawing, specifically illustrating specimens found in nature, and one of my favorite letters ends with “Here, have a drawing of a snail.”
Eventually Maddie has to resolve her romance with the fake Captain MacKenzie so she kills him off. She goes into mourning and tells her family she’s too distraught to ever enter a courtship again. She moves into a castle in Scotland that a relative left to her (so she and her future husband could be close to his home of course) and starts a career illustrating scientific journals.
She’s observing two lobsters, waiting for them to get it on so she can illustrate their “life cycle” aka lobster sexytimes when a mysterious dude shows up at the castle.
Turns out that Captain Logan MacKenzie is a real person who has really been getting her letters all these years.
Oops.
Logan started out as a penniless orphan but he’s done well for himself in the army. He has a lot of survivor’s guilt though, and he’s determined to do something for the men who followed him into battle and came out alive. He’s going to blackmail Maddie into marrying him by using her letters against her, so he can set up his Scottish soldiers as tenants on her land.
So Maddie is like “Ohhhhhh fuck.” She agrees to a marriage of convenience with Logan partially to avoid total humiliation and partially because Logan is verra verra hot (enter Sam Heughan).
So now the castle is over run by crustaceans, dispossessed Scottish soldiers, and Maddie’s patron may not give her the illustrating job of her dreams because presumably as a married woman she’ll be too busy pushing babies out of her lady bits to do ANYTHING ELSE.
Like any good marriage of convenience story, Maddie and Logan’s plan starts to fall apart because they desperately want to bone each other (SEE LOBSTERS! SEE HOW ITS DONE! GET CRACKING…whoa- bad word choice. Sorry little shellfish that was poorly done of me. I could have done that butter–BETTER! I meant better!).
Anyway, the reason this book works beautifully is that both Maddie and Logan need to grow as people to find happiness. Maddie has been hiding from the world and lying to her family, and she needs to confront or at least meaningfully acknowledge her social anxiety. Logan is a hero who has no feels because he was abandoned as a child and as a result he is physically incapable of snuggles. He could have been an Old-Skool hero who walks around with his head firmly lodged up his butt, but Dare makes him empathetic and more than occasionally tender. The way he tends to one of his soldiers who was seriously injured in battle was enough to give me the sniffles.
Plus the sexual tension in this book was excellent. I was dying for the hero and heroine or, at least the fucking lobsters, to hook up already.
Overall, When a Scot Ties the Knot is sweet and funny and sexy. If you pick it up be careful though, I had to read it in one sitting. Be prepared to call into work with “food poisoning.” Bad shellfish anyone?
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With respect, I place the emphasis on “historical,” regardles if the author is writing historical fiction or historical romance. It is still something historical.
If an author is going to write something “historical,” then I expect the historical aspects to be every bit as accurate as I do the spelling, grammar, syntax, and editing. Once again, authors owe readers an appearance of verisimilitude which isn’t going to occur if the author isn’t faithful to history.
I don’t believe my comments can be applied to the fantasy and paranormal genres. There an author must engage in world building although then, too, it would have to follow certain rules, such as basic physics.
Co-sign with all that Gloriamarie said. The problem with written-out accents is that English isn’t phonetic. There’s nothing wrong with a tag mentioning that a character has a specific accent but writing one out (frequently while messing up more subtle things like syntax or vocabulary that are real tells about where someone is from) is a way of saying “this person is weird and foreign” in a way that kind of makes them into a stereotype. (This actually is an issue for oral historians too. Do you write “Ah” every time someone says “I” or “t’ing” for “thing”? NO ONE in English pronounces vowels as they are written, so if you transcribe someone in non-standard spelling are you just visually portraying them as lower-class as opposed to the interviewer who has the “correct” pronunciation?)
Of course all historical romance is fantasy – but if you’re talking about real places then I think it’s respectful to remember that real people still live there and what’s a fantasy to you involves ancestors with names and real lives to them. My feeling is you shouldn’t turn their ancestors into caricatures any more than you would your own. (If you write a romance set in “Ruritania” with a handsome prince who falls in love with a commoner etc. etc. I’m happy to read it, and yes, I’ll notice that “Ruritania” has some parallels with Central or Eastern Europe but I won’t care. But my grandmother was from Prague, and if you write the same romance and say it’s set in “Bohemia” then I’d like some acknowledgment of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire, and some of the complexities thereof.)
The past couple of Tessa Dare books I’ve read, I found that I enjoyed reading your reviews of them more than I did the books themselves.
Loved this review as well, so off to become $5 lighter now (albeit apprehensively!).
Thank you, Rebecca. And the rest of the Bitchery who stand up for accuracy in history and down with the fake accents.
I have begun to think that there are some writers of “historical romance” who believe that we readers of this genre don’t care about the historical aspects of it and will swallow anything as long as the romance is hot enough. I am willing to suspend my credulity only so far and a story is good only if it is is also faithful to the history.
I am really happy to know that there are readers who also want authors to remain true to historical facts and situations. I urge more of us, including myself, to write reviews for Amazon, Goodreads, SBTB, and other places that I don’t know about.
Hmm… maybe that could be a discussion on SMTB… where else do we submit book reviews?
Okay, now I have to come back one more time. I do a ton of research. A ton. My office wall is floor to ceiling research books on topics from the history of toilets to popular Regency embroidery patterns. So I DO know when kilts were worn. I DO know what English aristocracy thought of Highlanders during the Regency. I DO know about the Highland Clearances, and the resonance those events still have on the Highlands. I DO know there was a lot of premarital sex going on, based on the high percentage of 6-and 7-month after-marriage births that went on among the peerage.
Maybe I misspoke earlier — it isn’t that history and historical accuracy aren’t important. It’s that I use them to tell a story about two people. I’m not trying to tell the story of Regency England or Regency Scotland. I use the elements of that history to set and further a romance.
Yes, I occasionally get things wrong. It isn’t intentional, and it’s usually because I simply haven’t been able to find a definitive answer about something. I do try. And I love that readers enjoy the atmosphere of history I try to create, because I enjoy learning about it.
“Maybe I misspoke earlier — it isn’t that history and historical accuracy aren’t important. It’s that I use them to tell a story about two people. I’m not trying to tell the story of Regency England or Regency Scotland. I use the elements of that history to set and further a romance.
Yes, I occasionally get things wrong. It isn’t intentional, and it’s usually because I simply haven’t been able to find a definitive answer about something. I do try. And I love that readers enjoy the atmosphere of history I try to create, because I enjoy learning about it.”
Thank you for the clarification. Because my honest reaction to what you wrote earlier was that you only cared about the history for the ambiance, not for the accuracy. I had struck you off as an author I wouldn’t bother read to read any longer because you were an author who couldn’t be bothered.
*******Very******** glad to know that is not the case because that is Most Definitely Not the impression I had of your work. There are those of whom I have had the impression they can’t be bothered to do any more research than what they read in other romance writers and, while it is inappropriate to mention their names here, I make my opinion known in my reviews.
And she had a great deal of experience observing the mating rituals of many strange and wondrous creatures, from English aristocrats to cabbage moths. When it came to courtship, however, lobsters were the most prudish and formal of all.
[…] Amanda: Not necessarily a “pet” but who can forget about the lobster in When a Scot Ties the Knot. […]