Blue Gem Publishing, $0.99, ISBN 978-1922772169
Historical Romance, 2017

A Highland romance by an author called Fiona Grant? A Highland Christmas Dream can’t be any more of a Highland-flavored romance, well, aside from being served stuffed inside a haggis, that is.

Bridget Rose is besties with her friends Buy My Story 1 and Buy My Story 2. Her personality trait that allows her to stand out from her besties is that she is the wistful one that dreams of meeting her true love, while her friends prefer to go down that feisty heroine route.

How does she know that a bloke is right for her? Well, not by the size of his holding, flock, or package under the kilt, of course, or whether he is kind or patient. She has to feel that he’s the right guy, and since she is a romance heroine and not a ho, we are talking about the visceral kind of feeling instead of that reaching out to grope kind. Since we all know what excellent judges of character a romance heroine usually is, yikes, maybe one needs to be alert and duck when necessary.

Bridget joins her besties to attend a Christmas celebration at Chieftain Urquhar’s place, and there she meets Alec Stewart.

The lad merely smiled and dipped his head in her direction, his face friendly and open. He looked fit, with a strong chest and arms. Sandy hair tumbled down around his cheeks, almost brushing his shoulders. In fact, there was nothing about the youth which was not pleasing to her eye.

Of course, our heroine is not shallow, so she’s not attracted to him because she wants desperately to mount that hot body or anything like that. No, it’s because she feels that he’s her soulmate. One that is conveniently hot and without financial issues, but hey, all that is just a coincidence. I’m sure Bridget will scream for Quasimodo to deflower her on their wedding right should she felt any connection with that fellow too.

Breathless, Bridget was both excited and afraid. She had never, never felt these sensations for any male.

Oh, so she finally experiences puberty? I do hear they marry young back in medieval Scotland. I am worried that the FBI will soon break down my door, but then I realize that this is a clean read and I don’t live in America, so phew, I am safe.

This story spends a lot of time describing Bridget’s sexual awakening—in a G-rated way, of course—so much so that there is more exposition about her heaving chest, breathlessness, excitement, and squee at inhaling even the same air in which Alec must have exhaled into. Therefore, it’s rather anticlimactic that this is not an erotic romance, because the natural progression of a story that has the heroine becoming increasingly thirsty and hungry for the man meat is for her to finally enjoy the banquet of man flesh that she desperately craves for.

Instead, the story tries to frame Bridget’s Lady Demitrescu-like hunger for the dingleberries as a cute, clean experience and the whole thing just feels misleading somehow. Kind of like how people try super hard to deny that the Old Testament is one of the oldest erotica in existence, come to think of it. I still can’t believe they made me read those things when I was a kid, and I blame the nuns for me eventually developing a complex when I grew up, one in which I find worship music from the 19th century and earlier as well as hunks cosplaying a man of the cloth to be… wait, what was I saying again?

Oh yes, this story. It’s short and it’s rather unbelievable in that these two characters meet and all of a sudden I am to believe that Alec has fallen in love with Bridget. Why? I know Bridget will be happy to ride that guy like it’s sheep rodeo day, but what’s her appeal to him? After all, our heroine gets the “plain, she really is, and mousy too” treatment from the author, so I’m not sure what his attraction to her is all about. The romance feels super shallow and even vapid, and the only thing that is of substance here is the heroine’s hormonal overload as she finally enters puberty.

The whole thing feels like a horny man-hungry hippo on the loose story masquerading as a clean romance, and I close this thing wondering more about what would happen if the author decided to go all sexy and raunchy on everyone—more than I give any thought to the story that I’ve read, at any rate.