The Highlander’s Sword started off well, but quickly spiraled down into an extremely frustrating read centered on my least favorite plot device: the Big Misunderstanding.

Aila Graham has been destined for the church since she was a child and expects no more out of life. Suddenly her father, the laird of her clan, demands that she marry Padyn MacLaren, the MacLaren, the fierce warrior who brought back her brother’s body during the war. Not only must she suddenly reconcile herself to a future with a complete stranger, but she has to marry him immediately. As in, within the next hour. Numbly, she follows her father’s orders, and she and Padyn are married.

Laird Graham wants the strength of MacLaren’s men to protect his lands from MacNab, a rival laird who also wants to marry Aila. MacLaren has agreed to this wedding only because he needs Aila’s dowry money and land. Unfortunately, MacLaren had a bad incident with a woman that left him with a deep mistrust of them, and he is completely suspicious of Aila from the get go.

On the night of their wedding feast, Aila waits upstairs in her room for an escort to dinner. She has never eaten in the great hall, and really thinks that she has to have an escort. No one comes to get her, and she is left waiting all night. MacLaren is stuck sitting downstairs by himself during dinner, cursing his errant wife. This one misunderstanding starts the marriage on a sour note – Aila is incredibly hurt that her new husband didn’t even make the effort to have a real marriage, and MacLaren is disappointed that he is saddled with a typical deceitful witch.

I was relatively confident that they would get over this initial misunderstanding and have a nice revelatory scene, and was therefore shocked when this misunderstanding became the conflict and hung like an albatross around their necks for the entire story! They both do plenty of stupid things because of this one misunderstanding, and any respect I might have had for the characters disappeared.

There is nothing specifically heinous about MacLaren and Aila’s characters. I thought it a little extreme that MacLaren’s hate of women extended to everyone, but evidently he was scarred for life. There isn’t much to say about Aila; she takes everything in stride, and kind of boring. I simply was not feeling the story.

Romance is severely lacking in the story. I found it difficult to believe that the characters fall in love with each other in the short amount of time they’re thrown together. MacLaren rescues Aila from MacNab, and they’re forced to tramp around the forest for various reasons. This close proximity breeds a good deal of lust. After a lot of running around willy-nilly, they suddenly declare their love for one another. I must have missed something, because I barely saw a friendship, much less a romance.

I think this book is afflicted with page-count-itis, a common illness of books these days. This storyline would have been served had it extended a hundred extra pages. With its current page count, three-fourths of the book is dedicated to running around in the forest, and a scant quarter is dedicated to a quickie romance. Also, in general, character development suffered. There were a couple of potentially touching scenes ruthlessly quelled by the scant attention allotted to them.

The prose was sound, and there were some truly humorous scenes. Unfortunately, the excess of unexciting subterfuge and paucity of romance made this book a bit of a dud. The dialogue also had moments of utter modernity that provided me with some unintended laughs. Ultimately, The Highlander’s Sword is an extremely average read.