Sandy M’s review of Must Love Kilts by Allie Mackay
Historical Romance published by Signet 4 Jan 11
I don’t know why I keep torturning myself with these Allie MacKay books. This is my third one. The first two were dismal failures for me, so I skipped
however many were next for a while. Then I received this book for review, felt obligated to read it, and though it’s a slight improvement over those first couple, there’s still something about this author’s writing that just leaves me uninspired and disconnected. Time to end the torture.
The prologue in this book at first gave me hope that what I would encounter in this story would be very different from what I’d read before. It’s serious and intense, and knowing time travel would be part of it, I let my hopes rise. I like the hero, Magnus, a lot. He finds his betrothed’s village in ruins, still burning, dead everywhere. He believes against hope he’ll find his love alive, but it’s not to be. He vows on the spot to exact revenge against the bastard Vikings who cut his lady down and and ended his life as it had been. Instead of myself, I prefer my heroes tortured, and Magnus wrings that word to its roots at the beginning of this book.
The heroine, Margo, is also quite likable when we first meet her. She’s loved Scotland all her life, collects anything and everything to do with the country. Her only wish is to some day visit the land of the Highlands. A woman after my own heart. I’m a Scotophile just like she is. And all of this works just fine for a time. The first thing that irritates, though, me is the silly names of some of the secondary characters, i.e., Patience Peasgood and Ardelle Goodnight. To me, those names just don’t go with the tone, the intensity of the story so far. I let the heroine’s last name, Menlove, go when I first read it, but more than that is just too much. Yes, those are perfectly good names, but they just aren’t in keeping with the way this story is told.
The next irritation comes when it takes nine chapters before the hero and heroine are finally face to face and the action should begin, but it begins and ends too quickly. Before Margo actually makes her time-traveling trek, we get only a couple of abnormalities where Margo appears to Magnus in his time, enough for them to want each other. That’s all well and good, but in between that all we get is a lot of boring story that I really didn’t care about. All of that could have been done in much shorter scenes and then used the extra time with Magnus and Margo together. Instead, we learn about Dina Greed – another name I don’t care for because it seems to be used to give me a hint at that woman’s character, which I don’t need. I’m intelligent enough to figure it out – and her obsession of Scotland, including her planned trip that she has to dangle in front of Margo. Also, we have to go through the hulabaloo of Margo winning a trip to Scotland, how she finds out about it, how her friends help out, and a lot more that just takes much too long. And it’s boring.
Once Margo does travel back in time, there is some action but not a heck of a lot. First we have to get through Magnus’ suspicions of Margo, though he’s lusted after her since the two visions he’d had of her. Then comes Margo’s aversion to violence that causes a few waves. I’ve never liked this looking at historical times with a modern eye bit in any book and it’s especially irritating here. Margo’s been obsessed with Magnus, loves that he’s a fine specimen of a man of his times and envisoins what it would be like to be with the man in the Scotland of her dreams. But she wants it her way in a time and place that aren’t hers. If you want something that badly, you obsess over it and then you get your wish, well, as they say, when in Rome. Don’t cry foul when it doesn’t work out just the way you want it, and Margo does that way too often for me.
During all of this, Magnus suddenly loses his appeal for me. A lot of it is the dialogue that just doesn’t seem to work any longer. He sounds like a different person than he did in the first half of the book. The way he speaks to Margo when her independence makes a showing doesn’t ring true to his character. He’s not the sexy alpha male he started out as; his revenge means too much to him when he now has something more important to live for. The ending is also a little too pat, everything working out just right, the person who was in the wrong place at the wrong time is now in the right place at the right time for Magnus to do his marvelous sword wielding. All that being said, I do like the eerie similarities between past and present characters; that’s done very nicely.
However, that isn’t enough to save the entire story. For a book that starts out in the vein this one does, it just doesn’t follow through with enough consistency to keep it from being a little too boring and eventually off-kilter. This may well truly be my last Allie Mackay book.
Grade: C-
Summary:
Margo Menlove loves everything Scottish. But when she wins a Highland vacation, she’s disappointed by the whirlwind tourist trail she’s taken on. She wants to experience the Scotland of warriors like the legendary Magnus MacBride. When she explores on her own, she picks up a beautiful stone on the shore–and awakes to the sight of MacBride himself in the heat of battle.
Magnus MacBride has seen many things while fighting the Viking hordes–but when the soaking wet, naked woman appears out of the surf, even he is taken aback. Even more stirring is a passion he hasn’t allowed himself to feel in years, instead living only for vengeance. But giving in to his wild desire would place Margo in mortal danger–unless they stand together and fight for the love neither can endure without…
No excerpt found.
