Sarah's Library

29/09 - Another highland romance?  There are so many out there that I was surprised that I enjoyed The Lady and the Laird.  I thought it would compare unfavourably to all the others I've read, but it didn't, it was a 3.5 star read (and it might have been 4 if it had bee a little longer).  I thought the story was good, but it did feel a little rushed.  I knew almost immediately how Alice had died, it was obvious and I was a little irritated that Cornick attempted to draw out the mystery, when there wasn't one.  The summary from the back of the book does not give a good account of the plot, it makes her out to be a letter-writing match-maker, when after reading it I know that the match-making part was an accident, that she was naively unaware her erotic letters could be used to woo women.  I didn't feel like Cornick planned the reasons behind Robert's behaviour towards Lucy or his reasons for not returning to his home town/island for so many years.  It was as if she knew that his brother would have to die to cause this kind of reaction in him, but couldn't come up with a plausible situation for him to die in, and so just made him fall off the cliff inexplicably while rescuing a boy who had slipped.  Robert tells us that Gregor had climbed on those cliffs since they were boys and shouldn't have slipped and the way this comes across to me is like it's the start of a mystery that Cornick didn't follow through with.  There was some strange plotting go on there.  But it was still good enough that I could overlook these niggling irritations to award it 3.5 stars.