Bookish Catriona finally gets to spread her wings.
Plot: Catriona is a born academic. Deeply introverted and thoughtful and perhaps a bit disconnected from the physical world. Because while she had been focusing on her schooling and her activism with the suffragettes, her father, who shares many of the same qualities with her, has been letting their tiny northern Scottish estate go to seed. But there’s a solution, because goddamnit she was going to be an author, and she was going to make so much money from her book that all their financial troubles would be done. Just as soon as she finished writing it. And also as long as her reputation remained white as snow, since being a woman was already a huge knock against her capacity to write books that would sell. So she figures she’ll hole up at the estate and write. And then her father invites a visiting scholar to stay. And he’s gorgeous, intelligent, treats her as an intelligent human being, and possibly has nefarious secrets. Also he might have seen her swimming naked in the loch. Shenanigans ensue.
Dunmore is a hit or miss for me. Her heroes tend to be alphaholes, which means that when paired with an alphahole heroine, they work beautifully for me, and when they don’t, it’s just some douchebag abusing a woman while the book tells us that actually he really loves her so it’s fine. Elias is not a douche. But he is deeply committed to his family, and to restoring artefacts effectively stolen from the middle east by British “archeologists” by legal means if possible, by any means if necessary. And given that Catriona is an archeologist who could not really study anything if artefacts were not brought back to England, this creates some inherent tension in their relations.
Their slowburn connection is wonderful. They both have very good reasons not to trust the other, and so many reasons to nip whatever attraction they feel in the bud, so Dunmore allowing them to cautiously circle each other as they grow to trust and care for one another is soul filling stuff. They navigate with heartfelt aplomb the intense difficulties they would face as a couple in a world that does not yet accept mixed-race couples, the vast differences in their culture and upbringing, their desires being, at least in part, in direct conflict.
The plot itself, however, really bogged the story down. I don’t know how many readers are picking up these books that aren’t already mostly, if not entirely, sold on the idea of returning stolen artefacts to their rightful owners, but I don’t think most readers needed as much convincing as Dunmore seemed to think they did. The intrigue around the recovery of those pieces felt like padding more often than it felt like an essential part of the story. There was very little resistance to the idea from just about anyone we’re expected to like, and the final solution to the problem was a bit of a deus ex machina hand waive at the end. It’s well written, I don’t want to give the impression that it isn’t, but there was never really a sense of any real stake, even with Dunmore spending so, so long amping up the tension.
The epilogue was nice. Also longer than it needed to be, detailing tedious demographic data about the forty years following this book (this person married that person, who had this baby who is now married to this person), but it was nice to wrap up the series with the cause these women dedicated their lives to actually bearing fruit and passing the torch down to the next generation.