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A review by li_ly
The Scottish Boy by Alex de Campi
3.5
3.5⭐️
I had a lot of issues with this book, but I think most of them stem from me doing absolutely no research into it before picking it up.
If you decide to read this, you need to go in knowing it's a captivity trope, and you have to be okay with that. You kind of need to pretend that it's not as bad as it would be IRL. If I put aside my moral issues with the power imbalances of the romantic leads (as well as my discomfort with Ian being 17 throughout most of the story...I don't understand why that was the choice made) I really like the book.
I thought the plot was great. I was intregued the whole time and caught off guard constantly! I thought the backdrop of this historical setting was well crafted and well written. I loved the plotics and the characters (main and side) and the journeys they found themselves going on.
My biggest issue with the novel was the smut. Unfortunately, this almost had me DNFing the book at the halfway mark. I am a slow burn girl, and I am used to historical romances having slow burns in them. This, however, was not the case for The Scottish Boy. They get together very quickly in this book. Because of this, I am not used to stories like this (ie: not a contemporary romance) having so much sex in them. Especially smut this graphic and with a really contrasting energy to the rest of the story. All of the scenes seemed to get thrown at me out of the blue with no lead up. We have pages of explicit sex burst into the story out of nowhere before settling back into the calmer historical style of the rest of the novel. Not only did I personality not vibe with the way that the smut was written (we all like different things and I don't think that it makes the novel less good) but I find that the author doesn't know how to separate sex and love. She refused to give us any single scene where Iain and Harry could have romantic growth that didn't immediately get cut short so that they could have sex. I was getting really frustrated as I wanted to be invested in their romance, but I wasn't able to see them as being in love with each other, only in lust. Every time they thought of each other or were in each other spaces it was lustful. There wasn't any romance built between them, and I think that that greatly took away from what coulve been such an amazing romantic story.
I think this story had great potential, and in the end, I really did like it as a political story, but I'm disappointed in it as a romance. I'm not saying that the smut needed to be removed, I just wished the author had added romance on top of those scenes. You can't just have the love interest have sex every 3 pages and think that that will be enough to spur on everything they go through in the name of love. The book was missing the romance needed for this love story.
I had a lot of issues with this book, but I think most of them stem from me doing absolutely no research into it before picking it up.
If you decide to read this, you need to go in knowing it's a captivity trope, and you have to be okay with that. You kind of need to pretend that it's not as bad as it would be IRL. If I put aside my moral issues with the power imbalances of the romantic leads (as well as my discomfort with Ian being 17 throughout most of the story...I don't understand why that was the choice made) I really like the book.
I thought the plot was great. I was intregued the whole time and caught off guard constantly! I thought the backdrop of this historical setting was well crafted and well written. I loved the plotics and the characters (main and side) and the journeys they found themselves going on.
My biggest issue with the novel was the smut. Unfortunately, this almost had me DNFing the book at the halfway mark. I am a slow burn girl, and I am used to historical romances having slow burns in them. This, however, was not the case for The Scottish Boy. They get together very quickly in this book. Because of this, I am not used to stories like this (ie: not a contemporary romance) having so much sex in them. Especially smut this graphic and with a really contrasting energy to the rest of the story. All of the scenes seemed to get thrown at me out of the blue with no lead up. We have pages of explicit sex burst into the story out of nowhere before settling back into the calmer historical style of the rest of the novel. Not only did I personality not vibe with the way that the smut was written (we all like different things and I don't think that it makes the novel less good) but I find that the author doesn't know how to separate sex and love. She refused to give us any single scene where Iain and Harry could have romantic growth that didn't immediately get cut short so that they could have sex. I was getting really frustrated as I wanted to be invested in their romance, but I wasn't able to see them as being in love with each other, only in lust. Every time they thought of each other or were in each other spaces it was lustful. There wasn't any romance built between them, and I think that that greatly took away from what coulve been such an amazing romantic story.
I think this story had great potential, and in the end, I really did like it as a political story, but I'm disappointed in it as a romance. I'm not saying that the smut needed to be removed, I just wished the author had added romance on top of those scenes. You can't just have the love interest have sex every 3 pages and think that that will be enough to spur on everything they go through in the name of love. The book was missing the romance needed for this love story.