Under Scottish Stars is the third book of the MacDonald Family Trilogy by Carla Laureano.  The setting of the story holds the largest appeal.  Who can resist a story located on the beautiful Isle of Skye?  The cover photography is attractive as well.

The basic writing of the story is okay.  The characters are fine, too.  There is really nothing about the story that stood out as much more than that, except perhaps the scenery.  Readers will not need to read the previous two installments to follow along just fine.  The author does an excellent job of briefly mentioning the backstories of other characters without wasting time focusing on them and their stories are not really important to this book.

Many will not care or feel differently, but this is what made the book less than desirable for this reviewer.  Starting with the first time Malcolm and Serena meet and continuing with nearly every subsequent encounter, they are either thinking or saying something with some type of sexual innuendo.  The end result is the impression that the protagonists were more interested in pushing the edge of their physical relationship rather than developing a true and lasting relationship.  Don’t misunderstand, the author put in some other aspects of a relationship based on more than lustful desires, but somehow it felt outshined by all of the innuendo.  The most frustrating part is that as a reader, I really want to like Malcolm.  In fact, I really like him, but the aforementioned hyper-focus on the physical relationship soured it a bit for me.

Review of a Digital Advance Reading Copy

This book was sent to Compass Book Ratings for review by Tyndale House Publishers

Content Analysis:

Profanity/Language:  None 

Violence/Gore:  A child is reported to have pushed another child and pulled her hair; a character recalls being bullied as a child and needing stitches. 

Sex/Nudity:  Several scenes in which a man notices and admires a woman’s exposed cleavage; a characters tells another he asked her to dinner not to bed; many mentions of someone being or looking sexy; report of a character seeing a toddler’s bare bottom; many instances of characters having long kissing sessions (details are fairly minimal – phrases such as deepening the kiss, breathing heavily, etc.), these sessions are followed by one or both characters saying they would love to stay the night, but there were children at home.

Mature Subject Matter:

Death of family members.

Alcohol / Drug Use:

Several scenes in which characters consume glasses of wine.