Review: Think twice...
Rating: 2 out of 5
Date: 05 8, 2011
It is difficult with the advent of self-published and small press books to separate good quality from poor. Often it is a matter of poor or no editing and that is the problem with this book.  Had there been an editor or at the least a good beta reader many of the word problems and punctuation errors would have been caught.But the real problem for this reader (I've been a Scottish/romance reader for over 40 years) is the lack of development of the story. The characters do not act or react as one might expect in a romance, and there is just no sexual tension to speak of (fighting each other and accidentally falling on each other is not sexual tension). So that when they do succumb to each other it is just not believable and lasts but two or three purple prose paragraphs. This might have been better executed if they just done "it"  behind closed doors, because as written it was very anticlimactic (no pun intended). The story drags with too many characters that seem to have no real purpose in moving the story along, which makes the pace of the story very slow and the reader loses interest in caring what happens to this couple. I kept wondering when the real story was to begin. Sorry, for me it just never did.Finally, historically it was just too bland, and lacking real knowledge of Scotland. It could have taken place in England and who would have known the difference. There were a number of historical inaccuracies that wouldn't have plagued this reader if there had been a purpose to the change, but this appears as filler or poorly executed foreshadowing for future books, despite the author's acknowledged experience.  As a Scottish historian and researcher I just didn't buy much of the premise for this story set in Scotland. Though I wil say she did pretty good with the dialogue, though the hero's Scottish dialect seemed to wane near the end of the story.Too harsh a review for a 99 read, you say? Maybe, but if self-published authors want to be taken seriously then the products they offer must meet a minimum of publishing standards which at the very least should be a copy free of grammatical errors. Was it worth the cost of the book?  For me, not really.