A review by tessisreading2
An American in Scotland by Karen Ranney

2.0

There is too much going on in this novel: on the one hand we have the entire Scottish MacIain clan, with their cousins and siblings and spouses and accents, and on the other hand we have this Civil War-set thriller. I just had difficulty with it in general; it felt like it was trying to have its cake and eat it too by having a thriller about trying to run the Union blockade – but don’t worry, everyone involved is really anti-Confederacy and anti-slavery, it’s just for economic reasons. (I mean, the hero literally says that if the end of slavery means the failure of his mill, then that’s what has to happen. So why are you running the blockade again?) The narrative gyrations required to absolve the heroine from complicity in slavery while still making her role in the plot plausible are truly spectacular, and pretty annoying: the heroine is from the north, moved down south to be with her married sister, was literally tortured by her brother-in-law (but stayed in the south because…why?), and is now trying to sell the family’s cotton in order to ensure their continued prosperity because… I don’t know why she gives a damn, honestly. She poses as her brother-in-law’s widow to his Scottish family for reasons I don’t fully understand, and then spends a lot of time agonizing and feeling guilty about it despite the fact that it… doesn’t really seem necessary, or like anyone else would really care.

Anyway, the slavery aspect of the story becomes increasingly uncomfortable.

Spoiler

We learn that not only did Rose’s brother-in-law routinely rape and mistreat slaves in a variety of awful manners, but he treated Rose herself as a slave because she insisted on helping the slaves: locking her in a shack for days, forcing her to sleep in a slave cabin, having her publicly whipped like a slave, forcing her to pick cotton in the fields and beaten by the overseer. This is wildly uncomfortable – it is appropriating the actual experiences of slaves and applying them to a fictional white romance heroine so we don’t think she’s a bad person for living on a plantation.

It just felt inappropriate in what is otherwise a light historical romance.

The writing is good overall and the author clearly took these issues seriously (Kathleen Woodiwiss this is not), so I'll be on the lookout for other books of hers, just preferably ones that do not make attempts to grapple with giant historical and moral issues.