My rating: 2 of 5 stars
The copyright is 2006 for this bundle, which includes five stories (The Highlander, Highland Barbarian, Highland Heather, Highland Fire and a short Highland Christmas), all could use a serious facelift. The age is showing. When first released as individual works (I don’t know the years), these stories might have been the height of style for the sub-genre. But readers now have more sophisticated tastes and expect more from the characters.
If you like head-hopping every paragraph, an omnipotent POV that sometimes including the thoughts and feelings of an entire group in a single sentence, and lines of prose that are reused from book to book, then this is the series for you.
If you like physically perfect, beyond beautiful, teen-age, petite, virgin heroines who are good at everything from the domestic castle duties to the field of battle, who are the leaders of their clan, who make "roll your eyes" stupid decisions, who decide to give up everything for the man they love, without asking him to make any sacrifices, then you will love these stories.
If your like heroes with nicknames like Savage, Brute and Dark - who can't win a fight when their lives depend on it, who rise from near death and still recovering from their injuries, later defeat the villain who nearly killed them, and other “roll your eyes” plot points that defy reason, then you just have to read these stories.
If you enjoy knowing the heroine will almost be raped - more than once - as a plot device, with villains who are flat, just born bad, with an abusive hatred for women; if you prefer that your heroines be abducted in order to fall in love with their captors, then hey, you just cannot resist this bundle.
Why did I finish the stories? Each one is like a train wreck, I knew what would happen, but could not look away until it was over.
For romance writers, study these stories so you know what cliched, overused, overdone, items to avoid in your modern work.
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