Review: A Scot in the Dark by Sarah MacLean
I am writing this review many months after reading it based on notes I took while reading the book.
The Duke of Warnick was the hero in this story and though I did like him as a character I really did think that his emotional journey in this book needed more page time to be explored more fully. He is a classic MacLean hero in that he is a massive man who truly does not believe he is good enough for the heroine of the story, which all does work for me. Though I will say that for a while I did think that he was fat and I was so happy that a romance author was writing a sexy fat man and then was a touch disappointed when he ended up being a thin but hugely muscled gentleman. When shall we get fat men in romance? But back to his emotional journey. He is used throughout this book to explore the shame the patriarchy causes men to feel when the put women on impossible and perfect pedestals. He is VERY 'if I touch her I will ruin her'. While I did like his emotional journey I really do not feel it got enough time for his feelings to be properly addressed and unpacked and especially felt like this story was rushed along towards the end. I just really liked him and his character growth and thought he needed a touch more time to executed perfectly.
This story also uses one of my least favorite narrative devices, when a huge action is taken off page by a point of view character but is obscured from the reader so that we can later feel like things are going wrong when they are not or so that we can be surprised with another point of view character. In this instance I truly feel like this popped the motion of the scene for me because I was far more interested the heroine's emotional reaction to this thing and I was getting the hero's reaction. This has to do with the revenge porn element of the story and I truly am torn about how I feel about MacLean's handling of this topic.
On the one hand I do think she made a really bold and empowering choice for the heroine to not distance herself from her nude portrait and for it to be so positively received with her being unashamed and no longer under this man's thumb. But I also do think that this really hampered the parallel with revenge porn. I just think that this went a little too far away from exploring the trauma of this action and tried to divorce Lily from 'victimhood' when she is objectively horribly victimized.
I can suspend my disbelief a bit and accept that the man who painted the portrait does not materially benefit from this portrait, but this is really hard to do. Because I genuinely do think he would have materially benefitted if this were true and I think that in real like men do materially benefit from revenge porn, so I did think this was another point where this parallel failed a little bit for me. Especially because this book dug so deeply into the ways in which Derek, the painter, truly did not respect Lily's personhood in any way, it felt a little bit like she continues to be denied that personhood by becoming a literal piece of art. I do think this was meant to be empowering and be a statement about not being ashamed of female sexuality I am just not sure it worked for me.
Smaller issue was that even though I did really like the conflict in this book I do think that it got a little bit repetitive as I was reading. I don't have much more to say about this, I thought it was a good conflict, but eventually I felt a tad like I was reading the same thing multiple times.
My last negative thing to say about this book (a book I truly did enjoy so much I promise) is that I feel very uncomfortable generally with how Scotland is treated in historical romance as a whole. I just never feel like the historical political realities of being Scottish and especially of being Scottish and being in close proximity to English people who have benefitted from the disenfranchisement of the Scottish people is never actually addressed in any satisfactory way. Also they do seem to write Scotland as a land devoid of women.
But on to a more positive note! I truly loved the beginning of this book so much. MacLean does such an excellent job building her characters so fully and quickly and beautifully layering the conflict that is going to be relevant for the rest of the novel. I was really impressed by how little time it took me to become fully invested in what was going to happen in the book and I am properly glued to the story.
I really did like the chapter headings, this book is a historical take on celebrity gossip and on revenge porn so I did think it was clever and fun that each chapter begins with an attention grabbing headline. I thought it really worked well with the larger narrative and was just a fun little structural element.
I am particularly interested in the way miscommunication is used in romance novels, I truly think it it vital for them to work, and I really liked the way Warnick misunderstands Lily throughout this story. He truly does not understand fully her desire for community and connection and instead sees her as someone in need of authority and protection. It is tangled up in his own patriarchal views and the shame he feels about himself in a way that really makes the reader understand why he has so much trouble understanding what Lily actually needs to be happy.
A much smaller thing I loved about this book, and many of MacLean's previous books, is the use of theater. I just think she does a really lovely job extracting meaning from performance and art in her stories. Also if you are in a theater in a historical you know something excellent or terrible is about to happen.
I thought this book has really excellent cameos throughout. I did want Lily to have slightly more on page interaction with her friends, but don't think the friendship was maligned in its page time. I do think this book did a good job showing that Lily's want for community and connection did go past her desire for a fulfilling romantic life and showed her growing her community by making friends that truly valued her. I really love a romance novel that spends time with a friend group.
I talked about Warnick feeling shame earlier in my review but I truly thought this was maybe the stand out part of this narrative for me. The reader really deeply feels this deep and abiding shame that has followed him throughout most of his life. We see how this shame has shaped him as a person, how his actions and thoughts and desires have all been warped by this horrible thing that happened to him as a teenager and see the ripple effects in how Lily interacts with him. This aspect of their relationship was my favorite, I loved watching these two try so hard to actually be able to understand each other and so much of that involved them working to break down this shame and created a trusting relationship to move forward together in.
This review is much longer than I anticipated. I did truly really enjoy this book and absolutely plan on rereading it, it really impacted me as I was reading it and I still regularly think about this book. But my last little comment, this book has so many building blocks of what would become Bombshell in it. Both in that we get to see a lot of the Talbot's and in that A Scot in the Dark and Bombshell both have pretty similar themes explored within them.
I gave this book four stars.
