Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This book sounded so great, I really wanted to love it. Unfortunately, I didn't. I ended up not even able to give it 3 stars, which is pretty sad. First, the author made a huge historical misstep. She pulled a story of tartans from the 18th century back to the 14th. There were no clan tartans in the 14th century, that was a much later development. In fact, it is highly doubtful that there were even kilts that long ago. So why build a historical novel around an anachronism? Sloppy research. Second, the characters were constantly being driven by the story- being forced to do things out of character for them because it fit the story, rather than letting the characters drive their own actions. There we're countless "huh?"moments in which motivations built previously flew out the window so that the character could make a certain planned scene happen. Third, the writing is really all over the place. There is a lot of jumping around that makes the story hard to follow. Also, there is at least 50 pages of unnecessary fluff that needs to be edited out to make the story cleaner. I admit the first error is the most severe in my eyes- historical novels without care to accuracy are just so pointless! Why bother to choose that time period at all? I understand that romance novels put kilts in Scotland in every century, just because, but they can't be your only source of information! A brief internet search would have given the author enough information to know that her tartan story didn't make sense in the 14th century.