Tamed By a Laird was the most difficult book to get through in recent memory. Not because there was anything tremendously wrong with it, nothing that so offended me as a reader that this review is written with outrage. Actually, those books are often easier to get through than this book, which was just boring.

Janet, Baroness Easdale, wants one more adventure before she gets married to her odious betrothed Reid. So when a group of minstrels come to her uncle’s home to perform, she takes off with them, pretending to be Bonnie Jenny, a singer. Her betrothed’s brother, Sir Hugh Douglas, is sent to fetch her – but when he finds the group of troubadours, he discovers he enjoys his other persona, Hugo, another singer and actor. They don’t leave immediately, in part because Jenny suspects something is amiss and will happen at the minstrel’s upcoming performance.

However, things change drastically when a well-meaning but ill-advised colleague tricks them into marrying each other in truth, instead of the play they thought they were acting in. They then return home, with the question of their marriage hanging over their heads – not to mention their growing attraction, question of her betrothal agreements, and the possibility of mischief among the troubadours.

This book is just altogether too long. Things don’t pick up until about 200 pages into the story, and those first pages are difficult indeed; it took me almost a month to force myself through them. Very little happens, and what does happen is poorly executed. I didn’t particularly care about Jenny or Hugh, whom I found immature and selfish, and inconsistent, respectively. The writing was a bit sloppy, with awkward paragraph breaks and some plot points that were ill explained and felt contrived and convenient.

That said, I can understand the praise that Amanda Scott gets for her novels. The book was well researched and had an air of historial authenticity that is rare. Dialogue, narration, vocabulary, dress, and actions all felt authentic to the fourteenth century, and for that I commend the author. I imagine with a more active plot, or more engaging characters, I would enjoy her books every much.

If I graded the book on the merits of the first half, it would rate a D- or F; for the second half, a C. I balanced these out with a D+. Things picked up considerably in the latter half, but the painful reading that was the uneventful first 200 pages makes it impossible for me to recommend it.