Second verse same as the first.
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In my review of The Bride, I stated that I liked The Wedding better than The Bride. Let me
clarify. Just because I liked one better than the other doesn't mean allll that much, cause I didn't like it allll that much betterrrr. I thought the humor in The Wedding was funnier, or maybe I was just in a better mood while reading The Wedding. However, the characters in both books are interchangeable. They are the same except for their name. Maybe this was so obvious to me this time around because I read them so close together and not a year apart like I did when they were first published. The only thing The Wedding had which The Bride didn't was a revenge plot device. This revenge plot is interwoven throughout the pages and in my opinion it is what makes the hero an almost-bonehead.Revenge. I hatessss revenge plots. When our hero Connor is ten years old, his father is murdered by another clan chieftain and a secret villain. Connor promises his dying father he will avenge him. Connor and a couple of the other boys are saved and taken in by Alec Kincaid (The Bride). Even though he is raised by the kindly stubborn Alec, he still has dreams of revenge - much to Alec's chagrin.
Then we have Brenna (heroine). Brenna doesn't seem to have any problems, except she has a tendency to leave things behind. When she first meets Connor, she's five years old and is instantly struck by Connor's bigness. If my calculations are correct, Connor is fifteen when five year old Brenna first sees him. Of course, even at fifteen he's the biggest guy in the room. He becomes her knight, and she cannot forget him (remember she's five.)
Years pass. Connor learns that his enemy is about to marry. Of course Connor thinks that kidnapping this young woman is the perfect revenge. I was not able to decipher his thinking on this (must have been a middle age time period thing). Anyway, he kidnaps Brenna and soon discovers she is the little girl from allll those years ago - now she has boobs.
Brenna and Connor bicker, argue, disagree. Connor is beyond arrogant. He's right about everything and he views Brenna as sort of a gnat - a gnat with boobs. She is of no importance to him except as a bed partner - and of course for revenge.
Speaking of bed partner, Connor almost immediately consummates his marriage to Brenna. Remember, they are almost strangers, even if he was her hero when she was five. I wouldn't say that this consummation was a forced seduction, but it came pretty close to it. You would think that after a billion years of romance reading I would be used to strangers doing the deed - but in this case their first dippety-do session came awfully close to setting off my ick-o-meter.
For most of the book Brenna yells, screams and argues with Connor. For his part, Connor ignores Brenna but he expects her to follow his orders and not question him. Brenna seemed to be two people to me - one moment she's arguing with Conner calling him an oaf, the next she's trying to please him. She tries to please him by doing things she thinks he will like. Although she is guessing about what pleases him, because she doesn't try to get to know him and he doesn't communicate. She is also oblivious to the furor she creates (much like Jamie from The Bride.)
I had a big problem with Connor. He's toooo arrogant, toooo omniscient, tooo stubborn, and toooo focused on his revenge. There is also a period of time in this book where he just up and leaves. Doesn't tell Brenna why, where, or for how long. I have no idea why Brenna fell in love with him.
I wish two things about Brenna. First of all I wish she would have stood up to her mother-in-law sooner. For someone who was supposed to be strong, her martyrdom with her in-laws didn't make a whole lot of sense. Secondly, I wish she had a different hero, someone who knew she existed and treated her like a human not a pet monkey.
As with The Bride, I was disappointed with The Wedding. I felt as if the author didn't really work all that hard to create two different stories. The heroes in both books didn't stand up to the test of time. Their means of communication boiled down to a grunt here and there. In the case of the heroines, they were both oblivious to the real world around them and the effect they had on it. At times they came close to being TSTL women. I did prefer The Wedding to The Bride, not because I liked it better but because I liked The Bride less. The Wedding didn’t age well.
Time/Place: Medieval Scotland
Sensuality: Warm/Hot/Oblivious
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