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So I came late to this party - never saw the series. I enjoyed the book. Didn’t love the pacing, didn’t love the heroine, didn’t love the gratuitous excesses of violence….I was frustrated with some of the choices the author made but I appreciated the descriptions. Enough that I’m going to go for the next book in the series…. ( )

UPDATE: 11/7/2015
I've recently started the audiobook (I listen to it when I'm driving to and from class), and I LOVE the reader Davina Porter. The way she does the voices for the characters is just perfect!

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If I could give this 10 stars, I would in a heartbeat! ( )

This is the story of a happily married woman who is content with her life and her nursing job. While on a second honeymoon to Scotland, she accidentally travels through a time portal and arrives in 1743 Scotland in the midst of a skirmish between Scottish clans and English soldiers. Her nursing skills earn her a small place; soon she finds herself in a forced marriage to Jamie, a handsome, young athletic adventurer who as she discovers later, is also quite high up in the Clans’ hierarchy.

She and Jamie fall madly in love and navigate the time just prior to the Jacobite Rebellion with a series of adventures and escapes – and lots of romance wrapped in soft porn.

The story features lots of excitement and romance. I also enjoyed the historical aspects of the soon to be brewing Jacobite Rebellion, a time frame I had little knowledge of. And finally a knife-edge choice at the end of the story – to stay with Jamie in the upcoming war or to return to her husband in the present time.

There were also tropes I wasn’t so fond of: forced marriage but falling madly in love; evil gay British commander sodomizing and torturing prisoners; Jamie beating his wife Claire into submission after she disobeys him.

Many people are totally captivated by the book. I’m not in their ranks but I am intrigued enough that I may go onward with the second book – or perhaps watch a few episodes on Netflix. I wonder how closely the book and the TV series follow. ( )

It’s like the author created this great premise, then built a strong, witty, principled protagonist, just to realize too late she had sold a romance novel to her publisher… and so she proceeds to contrive one unbelievable situation after another debasing her character as irrational and illogical, and turning her into a clown, a shell of base female stereotypes just so she can have sex. But not real sex, Skinimax c-grade, implied-only sex. I couldn’t continue the book after 2/3 when there were no believable characters left. ( )