Customer Reviews

Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband (The Daughters of the Glen, Book 1)

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Well...I'm not going to explain the book because you can read the previous reviews and the back cover to find out what this book is about. I am, however, going to review/critic the book.

As a first time reader of Ms. Mayhue I didn't know what to expect. I just read the back, remembering how I enjoyed Karen Marie Moning's highlander/travel through time series, and thought "why not?". At first, when I read the prolouge, I thought it was going to be one of those super cheezy romances with too much "I love you" and not enough depth to plot or characters. Boy was I wrong...the heroin in this story often reminded me of the witty, funny, yet strange females that Moning weaves in her books. And of course, the hero in this book reminded me of the hot, intellegent, yet overprotective men in Moning's books as well. I would have ALMOST considered it a rewritten/spinoff from Moning's Highlander series, if Mayhue hadn't added a Fae Legend to the story. Moning's Highlander Series followers would DEFINITELY enjoy this book, especially since that series is either on hold or ended.

Ms. Mayhue did a wonderful job weaving an incredible but energetic plot with characters who have depth--a trait that is sadly missing from so many romance novels written today. Ms. Mayhue seems to have quite a career ahead and I would almost say that she is the next Moning....if Moning wasn't still writing.

Scottish warrior Connor MacKiernan has vowed never to marry. As a
descendant of a fae prince, he has also vowed to protect the women of
his family. In order to protect his sister, Connor must marry. Using
faerie magic, Connor travels from Scotland, 1272 to Denver Colorado,
2007 to find his bride.

Caitlyn Coryell is having a wretched day. After finding her fiancé
with another woman, she goes home to lick her wounds. Standing in
front of the mirror wearing nothing but an antique pendant and what
was to have been her honeymoon lingerie, Caitlyn is stunned when a man
appears begging for her help. Connor asks Caitlyn to return with him
to his time, marry him and then return home. Though the plan sounds
simple enough, reality is anything but simple. The wedding is
delayed, someone is trying to kill Caitlyn and to really complicate
matters, Caitlyn is falling in love with Connor.

Melissa Mayhue's Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband is enchanting.
Connor is totally pant worthy and Caitlyn is so deserving of his
love. Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband has a suspenseful plot
and an unlikely villain. The secondary characters tickled my fancy
and I am begging for books for each of Caitlyn's brothers. Honor,
love, and faerie magic make Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband
captivating!


Annmarie
Reviewed for Joyfully Reviewed

STORY BRIEF:

The Setting:
Long ago Prince of the Fae, Pol, fell in love with a human Rose. They had three daughters. The descendants of these daughters would have a rose birthmark which was their link to the faerie world and the occasional use of faerie powers. In 1272 Scotland, Connor swore he would never marry because his fiancé left him to marry his no-good Uncle Artair. He felt women could not be trusted. Artair planned to give Connor's younger sister Mairi to an abusive older man as payment for Artair's debts. Connor could not stop the marriage unless he himself married and stayed home to be responsible for his sister. Previously he traveled in service to the king. Connor's Aunt Rosalyn asks the faeries to bring Connor's one true love to him. Cate from present day time travels back to Connor's time. She agrees to marry Connor and then return to her own time shortly after the wedding. Connor would tell others that she was visiting relatives.

The Story:
Cate is drawn to Connor and wants to have a relationship. Connor refuses to open his emotions or get to know her. Someone is trying to kill Cate to stop the marriage.

REVIEWER'S OPINION:
There was no interesting relationship development. The sources of conflict were weak. The magic of faerie powers seemed too easy. They felt like a convenient way to make things happen as opposed to providing some intriguing magic. A number of plot events were formulaic and typical for time-travel romance books. They were nice, but I'd prefer a different spin, or style, or voice - something to make it feel new and different.

DATA:
Story length: 356 pages. Swearing language: moderate to strong. Sexual language: none to mild. Number of sex scenes: 4. Total number of sex scene pages: 14. Setting: 1272 Scotland and present day Denver, Colorado. Copyright: 2007. Genre: time travel historical romance.

OTHER BOOKS:
To date, I've read one other book by Melissa Mayhue. My 3.5 star review of "A Highlander of Her Own" was posted 7-2-09.


CAUTION SPOILERS:
Someone threw rocks at Cate and her horse causing an accident. She went to the stables alone at night to check the horse for evidence but told no one where she was going or why. While at the stables, someone attacked her. When she started to tell Connor about the evidence, he refused to listen to her. He wouldn't let her talk to him for several days. During that time, she didn't tell her friends (the aunt and the sister) supposedly because she didn't want them to investigate and possibly come to harm. What? First, why go to the stables alone at night? Second, why not tell someone about the evidence, even if it is not Connor? Would a logical person do this?

After their marriage, Cate tells Connor she wants sex. After their first time, she tells him no more sex until he says he loves her or trusts her. So now they are apart. Later she changes her mind and says yes lets have sex again. Her reason was she decided to pursue joy in life. She changes her mind twice. I'd prefer a more interesting source of conflict.

Cate was engaged to Richard in the present. She realized she didn't love him and planned to cancel their wedding. When she went back in time, she fell in love with Connor. I did not buy it that she kept wearing Richard's engagement ring while she was with Connor. The author used this to provide a source for conflict between the two.

Other conflicts occurred because of inaccurate assumptions between the two. She loved him but wouldn't let him know. He thought she wanted to leave him which was not true. Unfortunately too many romance authors rely on inaccurate assumptions as a source of conflict which is not interesting for me.

Be careful when you start this book because you will not be able to put it down! I love the main characters Caitlyn and Connor. Caitlyn has just the right amount of spunk to hold her own with a Highland warrior. Connor is yummy, a strong alpha with a heart. The story pulls you on as you worry and wonder how these two will find their happy ending when it seems as if everything and everyone is conspiring to keep them apart. When you close this book, I promise it will be with a smile on your face. Ms. Mayhue is an author to watch. I can't wait for October when the next book in the series, HIGHLAND GUARDIAN, is released.

After reading some decent reviews about Thirty Nights I was looking forward to something a little different. It starts off well but then just gets lost in the middle. I expected Cate to have more fire and intelligence, she kept mentioning that she was very smart etc but then didn't use her head. Connor was just a stereo typical 'romance' Highlander (its the best way I can think to decribe him)parts of the book reminded me of a hannah howell novel(cringe).

I enjoyed the ending where Caty got her family involved to help rescue Connor and his sister but in the epilogue are we really just expected to believe that three people from the 1200's adapt and work in modern day society to the point off being rich, highly educated etc??

If your up for a bit of light reading this is a good choice, just dont go in wanting any depth to the magic or the realtionships

this debut book started well in the prologue, in telling an interesting background of the Legend of the Fairie Glen. My high hopes for a great story were quickly dashed by the sadly cliched, one dimensional hero and heroine. While the hero wasn't so bad, as usual, the author gave all her creative cake to the male lead and left the heroine the crumbs.

Cate was your typical weak, low self esteem "modern" heroine who must continually be rescued by her Scottish Highlander. Unfortunately, this seems typical for most of the Scottish Time Travel Romances I've tried. Authors-please quit teaming such strong male leads with "too stupid to live" heroines!

From the family/lover treachery storyline to even the "instantly loyal" wolfhound, the book rang of an amalgamation of storylines done to death and then some. I'm being generous with a 2.5 stars as this is a debut novel, but I won't be bothering to read the other books in this series.

Like they said before me, a keeper, will definitely buy other books from this author. The story is well written, interesting, has romance, time travel, frustrated alpha male, stubborn female, a great plot line, what else could I ask for!! If you are looking for new romance author, this is a very good one.

I really enjoyed this and have already ordered the next few books.
Why this profoundly silly, fairy princess-style, completely implausible book worked for me where others in the genre didn't, I can't really pinpoint. Perhaps it's because it unashamedly grabs onto the fairytale with both hands and without any pretence of being serious, and that made it much easier for me to buy into the story.

As seems to be the case with most time travel romances, we have a mediaeval Scottish hero who marries a modern-day woman. And as always, instead of the more likely (`likely' being a relative term here) scenario of him travelling to modern-day Scotland to find his woman, he goes to the USA.

There - in the land romantic fiction has decreed the sole provider of wenches for male vampires, shapeshifters, secret agents and Highlanders the world over - our hero, Connor MacKiernan, finds his ideal woman: Caitlyn Coryell. A (virginal) woman who fits into his society perfectly; her contemporary speak and American accent written off as minor quirks rather than the major communication issues they should have been.

We find ourselves in a time of magic, where everybody is abnormally tall and attractive (so that there're plenty of sexy Scottish types for later books, I suppose), and apart from the odd little issue here or there, life in the Middle Ages is rosy and equally as comfortable as life in the future.

Maybe my enjoyment of this was due to the pretty cover in the vein of Lady Lovely Locks meets the She-Ra castle, I don't know. Maybe it was reading this on the weekend with the accompaniment of a couple of glasses of wine. Whatever it was, while I cannot stand Karen Marie Moning's take on time travel in Scotland, Melissa Mayhue's book was wildly entertaining, and when the improbabilities started piling up I couldn't care less - it was too much fun. I almost felt as though I was reading a fairytale - and in some ways it was, with fae magic being responsible for the travelling between centuries.

Mayhue's prose was far more engaging than Moning's, and lacked those long and tedious passages of introspection that Moning is so fond of (and that bored me into putting her book down many, many times before I could finish it). Her humour is far better - she finds more to laugh about than toilet jokes. Her structure was good, keeping its focus instead of head-jumping between every character in the entire series. Her use of the historical setting was great - working the history into each and every scene instead of hitting us with massive information dumps.
To top it off, Mayhue's characters are far more likeable (Connor alone was enough to make me pretend not to notice how preposterous the story was), and her women not so incredibly stupid.

Of course you have to be in the right mood for this kind of book. Caitlyn is in her bedroom in Denver when Connor turns up and announces she has to go back in time and marry him so he can save his sister. He swore he'd not marry a woman in his time, and he's so honourable he won't break that vow (yeah, makes sense!).

Caitlyn gets right into it from the outset, and Mayhue does away with the heroine's disbelief about the situation entirely; Cate just goes with the flow.

Cate's endless use of complex, colloquialism-ridden modern English was silly, and certainly that's a major issue I have with KMM's books too. I wanted to scream at Cate a few times, "Think, woman! Think of how to phrase it so they'll understand!" However at least we had the occasional comment from Connor that he had no idea what she was talking about!
I must admit that while the historical accuracy is questionable, it's obvious the author actually made an effort to do some research.

So, I had a great time reading this, and Connor was one of the best pseudo-Scottish hunks I've come across in fiction. Not even an old-style, fertility-filled epilogue was going to ruin my merriment. No doubt if I'd spent any more time in Scotland than I have I'd be tearing my hair out in frustration with the misrepresentation of the country, so thankfully for me and my reading experience I was for the most part able to block it out.
I found Thirty Nights with a Highland Husband to be far better than the insanely popular and similarly-plotted Karen Marie Moning series.
It may well be a Disney princess version of mediaeval Scotland, but it had more depth than I expected, and it sure was fun.

I did really like this book. It was compared to Diana Gabaldon though and I dont think they are the same style. Not near as much detail in this book. This is not always a bad thing. It was a really easy read and the content was really good. I am on the second so it is good enough for me to keep going.

From my wife Sarah: I read this book while on vacation and enjoyed it. I really gravitate towards time travel themes, and so I picked this book up. It was fun and kept me entertained.

There were things I felt would have contributed to it being even better. I felt that there were some things that were not well explained (like why would the lead character agree to go back in time - it happened too easily and without much depth of explanation). I also felt that the author could have gone deeper into what the character may have been thinking and feeling at times. Lastly I would have really enjoyed reading more of what life would have been like in the past, what culture shock would have been involved, and what it would have felt like for someone from this time to be back there.

Regardless, it was still a really fun read that pulled me in from start to finish. I would certainly recommend it to those who enjoy romance or time travel stories.