Charming the Highlander

This is the second Janet Chapman book I’ve started, though only the first I’ve finished. I attempted to read The Seduction of his Wife because it sounded so delightfully batshit insane, but within 20 pages of the hero losing his shit with the heroine over the most minor of things I had to put it down. At the very least, this one didn’t start that way.

Charming the Highlander begins with a 13th century druid trying to send a 13th century highland laird (it’s always a laird) to the 20th century so he can marry an as-yet-anonymous/unknown 20th century lady and produce lots of babies so the druid can eventually have his protegee. But then Greylen MacKeage (Greylen being a totally classic 13th century Scottish name, so many show more Greylens), along with a few of his men, are ambushed by a rival clan, the MacBains. Long prologue short: everyone gets flung into the 20th century.

Flash forward four years and Grace Sutter is saying goodbye to her dying sister Mary. Mary ran away from the father of her baby when he proposed marriage and explained that, oh, as an aside, he’s actually from the 13th century? Several months later, Mary gets into a fatal car accident (trying to get back to him once she realizes she loves him enough to deal with him being a time traveler), leaving her slightly premature baby to her sister with the promise that Grace will take the baby back to its father.

This is the set-up, but before I go further with my thoughts, I will say that this book suffers from a common problem of throwing a million plot ideas at the wall and just kind of half-assedly dealing with all of them. I might be in the minority here, but I honestly don’t need much of a plot at all if the relationship is strong enough to carry the novel along. Which is all set-up to talk about the rest of this book.

Grey(len) and Grace end up on the same six seater bush plane to Pine Creek, Maine. It crashes. Greylen uses CPR to bring Baby back to life. Oh right, because Mary makes Grace promise to let the baby’s father name him, Grace continues to call the month old baby Baby for 3/4s of the book. Which is delightful, you can imagine. Naturally, because of magic and science, Grey falls in love with Grace at first sight and in true Highlander Laird fashion becomes super possessive.

Though, I will say, Grey’s possessiveness and other associated 13th century Man Traits are almost an afterthought. As if Chapman was concerned that maybe he was little TOO modern and forward thinking, so there should probably be a part where he curses at her and screams he loves her while grasping her shoulders almost painfully. It’s all very paint by numbers in that respect, but since the author wasn’t terribly committed to the accuracy of Grey’s characterization, he’s not nearly as intolerable as one would expect.

Then there’s another near death experience where Grace almost freezes to death before she finally makes it back home after Grey saves her life. (Again.) But there’s a massive ice storm! This is where there starts to be a million plot threads that are just tossed out left and right.

Grey’s family is opening a ski resort and the ice storm MIGHT ruin their ski lift. Baby’s father’s Christmas tree farm is in danger of being ruined. Grace abandoned her job in Virginia to come here, and her almost-sort-of-boyfriend-and-boss shows up more than halfway through the book in order to tell her that her project (she’s a rocket scientist) has been sold to a Japanese firm that is going to use it to build a weapon of mass destruction. But wait! She can’t pull out because agents from that company are coming to kidnap her and will probably kill her!

It was such an unnecessary divergence that I was just aggravated. The book developed a totally different tone and plot for all of about 75 pages in the latter half of the book and distracted from what the rest of the book was about. There’s also a whole backstory of the MacKeages hating Baby’s dad because of a whole mess that went down back in the 13th century.

It’s exhausting, honestly. I can’t even remember all the stuff that got brought up and dismissed in the blink of an eye. But it resulted in the book just getting terribly messy and convoluted by the end of it. Between the magic plotline that was also in the background but never fully committed to, and the rocket ship/WMD plotline that was never fully committed to, and the 13th century personalities and adjustments that are never fully committed to, it just felt like a novel that was trying to be everything, but not achieving much of anything.

All this to say, I didn’t hate the book. Certainly not like I hated The Lion’s Lady that I reviewed previously. I gave this one 3 stars on goodreads, because on the whole, it’s inoffensive and silly and certainly a quick read. But it’s honestly more somewhere in the range of 2.5-2.75.

Oh! But I almost forgot my favourite part! Grace had to hide Baby’s feet from his father for a long time because she wasn’t ready to give him up (and thought the father was insane because he thought he was from the 13th century) because —- the both had twelve toes. At that point, I just had to put my head down and laugh. show less

Charming the Highlander is the first book in Janet Chapman’s Pine Creek Highlanders series. Laird Greylen MacKeage and three of his men, along with their chief rival and several of his men are catapulted forward in time eight hundred years, thanks to the magic of a wizard named Daar. For the past four years, they’ve been acclimating to their new surroundings with the help of Daar who is now masquerading as a priest. They’ve taken up residence in the small town of Pine Creek, Maine, where Grey is now the owner of a ski resort, which is nearing it’s grand opening. Elsewhere, scientist Grace Sutter works for a space exploration company and hopes that the technology she’s developing will allow people to travel into space and even show more to Mars on a regular basis in the near future. However, her work was put on the back burner when her sister came to stay after leaving the man who got her pregnant. She had just decided to return to her boyfriend when she was in a car accident. On her death bed, she made Grace promise to return her child, who was delivered via c-section, to his father. Grace returns to Pine Creek with the baby in tow, but the prop plane she’s traveling on for the final leg of her journey crashes in the mountains. The only other survivor is their fellow passenger who happens to be Grey. He quickly takes charge of the situation and saves both Grace’s and the baby’s lives from the bitter cold and snowy weather conditions. Finally back at her sister’s home, Grace has a big decision to make about the baby’s future. She wants to honor her sister’s wishes, but she isn’t sure a man who claims to have time traveled can be trusted with an infant. Then Grace’s boss makes an unexpected visit informing her that he sold her technology to a company that wants to use it to create weapons and that there are nefarious men on the way who will stop at nothing to get their hands on Grace who is the only one who can decipher the garbled transmission their space probe is sending back to Earth. Throughout all the turmoil, Grace has been falling for Grey, but will she be able to trust him when she discovers that he, too, is a time traveler who hasn’t been honest about his origins? And will a twelfth century warrior be able to save Grace from the modern bad guys when they kidnap her?

Grey was born in the year 1171. He was Laird of his Scottish clan and a respected Highland warrior before being catapulted eight hundred years into the future by a lightning storm created by a wizard. Grey doesn’t know for certain how they got there, but he’s been keeping a close watch on the priest named Daar who helped him and his men acclimate to the twenty-first century. Daar was able to sell some of their possessions for enough money to build a castle in their new home along with a ski resort business that’s about to open. Grey was returning from a travel convention in Chicago when the plane he was flying on went down. He manages to keep Grace and her baby safe during the crash and use his warrior’s survival skills to get them safely off the mountain and back home. He knows almost immediately that he wants to claim Grace as his woman, but she takes a little convincing. In the meantime, he looks out for her and her baby’s well-being. When Grey discovers that the child isn’t hers after all, but is the son of his mortal enemy, he supports her choice to keep him from his father. But Grace won’t stop until she’s brokered peace between the stubborn, feuding Highlanders. Then kidnappers come for Grace, leaving Grey in a race against time and the elements to save her. Usually I’m a big fan of Highlander heroes, but initially I wasn’t vibing with Grey. Part of the problem is that he’s a rather underdeveloped character, but he was also being a little too possessive and cavemanish in the way he kept grabbing Grace, kissing her, and feeling her up. Then a chapter or two later, he’s giving his men a lesson on women’s rights, which was a complete 180 that practically gave me whiplash. Luckily he evened out more as the story progressed, so he wasn’t as bad as some heroes I’ve read. I liked him better by the end, but I still didn’t fall for him the way I wanted to.

Grace comes from a rather large family, but her parents died some time ago. She’s a top scientist who’s been working on technology that will hopefully make space travel more common and accessible to the average person. In the midst of her project, her sister, Mary, came to visit, but she was being secretive about her reasons for leaving the boyfriend who got her pregnant. About a month before her due date, she decided to return home and reconcile with Michael, but she was in a car accident along the way. Her baby was delivered by c-section, and before she died, she extracted a promise from Grace to take the baby to his father. However, she also finally revealed that she’d left him because he’d claimed to be a time traveler. A month later and still grieving the loss of her sister, Grace returns home to Pine Creek with Baby, but she hasn’t decided yet whether she’s going to tell Michael the truth. It all depends on how she feels after meeting him and whether he’s still making his outrageous claims. Then her plane crashes on the mountain and she and Baby are saved by their ruggedly handsome fellow passenger. Grace is very attracted to Grey, and despite having a lot on her plate to deal with, she comes to the realization that she wants to be with him pretty quickly. When the shady business that her boss sold her technology to kidnaps her, Grey must ride to the rescue once again, but if he can save her, will she be able to trust him and handle the truth of his origins when it’s staring her in the face?

I enjoy smart heroines, so overall, I liked Grace pretty well, except maybe for her eating up Grey’s possessiveness so easily. The other small thing that bothered me a bit is that Grace is a thirty-year-old virgin, which in and of itself is fine with me. But she simply says that she’s saving herself for marriage. In this modern age most women who’ve made this choice do so because of religious beliefs or some other specific reason. However, we don’t learn until late in the story what that reason was and I didn’t care for the fact that it was merely rooted in male chauvinism. Otherwise, she was a pretty good character who took on the role of temporary motherhood very admirably and despite having become attached to Baby, she did the right thing in the end by giving him back to Michael.

The Pine Creek Highlanders series is eight books long, so we meet some characters in Charming the Highlander who go on to get their own books in the series. Grey’s brother, Morgan, seems like he might be a little more lighthearted than Grey, and his story is the next one in the series, Loving the Highlander. Poor Michael is a tragic character who has now lost two women he loved and become a single father. Luckily he’ll finally get his HEA in book #3, Wedding the Highlander. From there, it moves on to the next generation. Book #4 is Michael’s son, Robbie’s story. Then Grey and Grace’s daughters, Winter, Megan, and Camry respectively become the heroines of the next three books, Only With the Highlander, Secrets of the Highlander, and A Highlander Christmas.

Overall, Charming the Highlander was a pretty good read. It held my attention well and was fairly entertaining, though not perfect. I couldn’t help feeling a little tweaked by the chauvinism in the story from both Grey and his men and later from Grace’s brothers. I understood on some level that Grey and his men might have different attitudes, having come from an era far in the past, and they do lighten up as the story progresses, but I’ve read other time travel and historical romances where the men didn’t act like this at all. And when it came to Grace’s brothers, IMHO, they had no excuse, because they’re supposed to be modern men. I also felt like Grey and Grace’s romance was rushed. Insta-love has never been a favorite trope for me, and they fall in love and commit to marriage in less than a week, which stretched the bounds of credibility a bit. I didn’t really feel much of an emotional connection between them early in the story either, but it did get better as it went along. Another small complaint I have is that I usually have pretty high expectations for the first love scene, especially if one of the characters is a virgin. Grey and Grace’s first sexual encounter left a lot to be desired with him not even attempting to pleasure her, which I thought was rather selfish of him and a major let-down. At least they had a nice, romantic, and somewhat steamy one toward the end that helped to make up for it some. Otherwise, I enjoyed the story. The town of Pine Creek has a certain charm to it, although I don’t know that we got to see a lot of it given that there’s ongoing inclement weather throughout the book. I also thought it was cute that Grey had built an actual castle—though with some modern amenities—in the middle of the Maine wilderness. I like that Grey and his men eventually bury the proverbial hatchet with Michael so that they can all live in harmony from now on. So the story had upsides too. It ultimately has left me open to checking out the other books in the series, which will work out well since I already have the second book on my TBR pile. show less

In 1200 AD during a clan battle in the Scottish Highlands, a wizard casts a spell that sends several MacBain and MacKeage warriors into the twenty-first century. The ten time travelers include the MacKeage brothers Greylen and Morgan. This engaging time travel romance occurs after the displaced Highlanders have some time to adapt to their new environs. Still the audience observes the discomfit of Greylen when he flies on the commuter plane as this goes against all he knows (if God wants man to fly he would have given him wings attitude). It is this type of detail to the feelings especially of the lead couple that turns this into a delightful tale.

Being so focused on her career and her scientific discovers has made the heroine completely ignorant of what most people treasure most- family and love. When her sister is in a fatal car accident and dies shortly after, leaving behind a vulnerable infant son, the heroine is suddenly thrust into a world she has no idea about. Bound by a deathbed promise to unite the baby with his father, the heroine makes the trip back to her hometown. On the way she meet the hero. He's incredibly large, beyond hansom and possesses a strength about him that goes beyond just psychical. When he's around, you just feel safe. Which is entirely convenient as their plane crashes into the frozen wilderness and without his quick thinking, she and the baby could show more very easily have died. The hero knows from the second he sees the tired looking but beautiful heroine that she will be his. Thrust forward in time by a lightning storm and a wizard, he's managed to cope well in his new world considering but he still hold firm to some more old fashioned beliefs about women. When their plain crashes into the middle of nowhere in freezing temperatures he uses all his experience with the wilderness to do everything in his power to save the woman whom he claims as his. Though it's a harrowing journey and very nearly the death of the heroine, he manages to do as he promises and bring her home safely. In the process of their adventure they form a lasting and deep bond. Though the heroine is skittish at times and is stubborn with her independence, much to the heros displeasure, she knows in her heart just how attached she's become to her savior. Though the hesitation she feels towards falling for the hero is strong, the hesitation to give us the infant to his father is stronger. She come to love the baby boy as her own and spends to novel suffering over the indecision to do as her dying sister asked and give the lonely man his baby boy or to keep the boy as her child and raise him as her own. Though she tries to rationalize her unease to give up the boy as thinking the father may be unstable as he claims to be from the past, it's actually cowardice and possessiveness for something she never new she wanted-family. I loved this book because it had a little bit of everything. Paranormal elements, character development, passion, pain and life lessons I loved the fact that the heroine helps to mend the relationship between the hero and her sister lover because it really is stupid to hold onto a grudge for 800 years. Also, it's super sad to know that the other man is all alone, his clan having died off, and moves closer to his enemies just for the simple fact that he longs to be around the familiar. And the sisters death scene tore at my heart strings, as did when the heroine finally gathers to courage to give up the boy. I thought this was by far the best book of the series and I was pleasantly surprised. I loved the hero, modern in so many ways yet old fashion in so many others. Possessive and extremely manly but extremely loving and so sweet with the baby. I liked the heroine because though she's a strong independent woman, she doesn't always fight the heros' protective instincts and in fact allows him to possess her as she possesses him in equal measure. show less

Grace Sutter's unmarried sister was returning to her boyfriend from Grace's house when she was in a terrible car accident. After the accident and giving birth prematurely to her tiny son, she succumbs to her injuries but not before extracting Grace's promise to return the baby to his father, the man Mary had fled before he knew she was pregnant. Grace puts her career as a rocket scientist in jeopardy to do just that despite her misgivings. And then the plane taking her back to the tiny and remote Maine village where she and her siblings grew up crashes on a mountainside. Grace and Baby survive because of the help of Greylen MacKeage.

Unbeknownst to Grace, or anyone else in the village, Greylen and his brothers are medieval Scottish show more warriors who have been tossed unceremoniously into the twenty-first century by a wizard eager to find and train his heir. Since Greylen is to father the babe with a modern woman, he has been brought foward in time although Greylen himself remains in ignorance of the reason. He feels an immediate connection to Grace and she to him, even before the crash. But the baby Grace claims is hers (what's a lie or two amongst destined lovers?) and with whom she is traveling will test their destined love. Baby is Mary Sutton's son by Greylen's sworn enemy Michael MacBain and she had initally fled Michael when he told her of the storm that transported him from the 1100's to present day. This fact is something that Greylen had never intended to share with anyone and that Grace thinks Michael is possibly insane because of his tale doesn't help matters. And while Greylen might admire Grace's spunk, intelligence, and drive, when she asks him to put aside his enmity to help out MacBain in return for her helping him, he is torn.

The tension between the main characters is pretty electric and although it is of the immediate, at first sight variety, the hardships that Grace and Greylen suffer together, bonding them closely, help to alleviate some of the skepticism that normally accompanies the love at first sight thing for me. I'm not a huge fan of time travel but it isn't overplayed here. I was disappointed in the dramatic, and somewhat nonsensical denouement as a result of Grace's highly charged job and the corporate secrets with which she and she alone seems to understand. That bit strained credulity even more than the time travel plot line. But overall, most romance readers who like a good Scottish warrior and fantasize about one living in the present day will appreciate this light and quick read. show less

I thoroughly enjoyed this "reverse time travel". Take one modern day rocket scientist, add in a Scotsman transported 800 years into the future who's been given time and money to adapt, and you have the story. The magic that's been added to the story is a matter of convenience to the author, but good story telling carried me through. I'm a sucker for a warrior, and Grey has adapted well enough and is intelligent enough to capture my attention. Grace is like able from a new mother perspective, more comfortable with science than with humanity and unsure how to care for her orphaned nephew. Her awakened maternal instincts were believable to me, and her struggle to do the right thing was tangible.

This was my first book by this author, but it won't be my last. I'm a big fan of braw Highlanders and was eager to read about their time traveling adventure. I liked the premise and I thought the plot was decent. However, we see them thrown through time, then we don't see them again until they're acclimated to society...with the help of a "priest" who happens to be the same druid who sent them into the future.. I WANTED to experience that awkward transition from 1200 A.D. Scotland to modern day America!

The author made me care about the characters, which is saying a lot. Michael tugged on my heartstrings and there were a few times where I was ready to smack Grace for keeping information from him, but she did right in the end and show more redeemed herself. Grey was a great guy, but with all of the Scots I would've preferred to see more Scottish characteristics, like a Scot's brogue. The men were a little "too" acclimated. Again, a little more awkwardness with modern day technology and society would've made this an out of the ball park book.

There were a few areas where the story felt all over the place, but it always came back on track quick enough. Jonathan was a toad and I'm wondering if we'll hear from him again. It was an enjoyable story, with tremendous potential for the future. I'll keep reading the series. show less