Midnight Honor - Marsha Canham
Nov. 19th, 2011 09:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dangermousieCan I recommend a book? The book in question is Midnight Honor by Marsha Canham, and is about "Colonel" Anne Mackintosh, a Scottish noblewoman who raised a regiment to fight for Bonnie Prince Charlie in the 1745 rebellion, undaunted by the minor inconvenience of her husband serving as an officer in the English army. Those must have been some interesting family dinners!
I wanted to read this for two reasons:
1. Anne was a minor character in Canham's awesome Blood of Roses and I was interested enough to google her and find out she was a real person. My desire to read a book about her, if one existed, was set when I read this in wikipedia:
The next month her husband...[was] captured north of Inverness. The Prince paroled Captain Mackintosh into the custody of his wife, Lady Anne, commenting “he could not be in better security, or more honourably treated.” She famously greeted him with the words, "Your servant, captain" to which he replied, "your servant, colonel" thereby giving her the nickname "Colonel Anne".
Completely irrationally, that made me think of Aral and Cordelia from the Vorkosigan books and I was set.
2. I really loved Blood of Roses. Really really really. And this was part of the same 'trilogy' about the 1745 rebellion.
So yes, I read it and was addicted and loved it (even if a very small part of me wished I could read more more more about Alexander and Catherine Cameron from BoR). Anne is pretty much an amazing heroine - brave and strong-willed but not Mary Sueish - she has a temper, she jumps to conclusions, and she is embracing what a rational person should know is a lost cause. And her relationships with both her husband Angus and with Alexander John McGillivray, the man who leads the clan into battle (she may be a symbolic leader but she is not a military commander) are very very messily complicated - she may love her husband but they are separated for large chunks of the book (and for a long time not just by distance but by ideology) and you can see her tempted with her sexay sexay war chief (that whole relationship was pretty tragic tbh).
Canham normally writes (excellent) romance novels, but she seems to have dispensed with them for these books. BoR was only a romance novel under a very loose definition of the term and this really isn't one at all - is it romantic? Sure (I shipped Anne/Angus like whoa) but it pretty much takes every romance novel rule (including the cardinal one that the bulk of the book should be spent on the relationship) and stomps on it.
So, if you like historical fiction of romantic bent, check it out!
I wanted to read this for two reasons:
1. Anne was a minor character in Canham's awesome Blood of Roses and I was interested enough to google her and find out she was a real person. My desire to read a book about her, if one existed, was set when I read this in wikipedia:
The next month her husband...[was] captured north of Inverness. The Prince paroled Captain Mackintosh into the custody of his wife, Lady Anne, commenting “he could not be in better security, or more honourably treated.” She famously greeted him with the words, "Your servant, captain" to which he replied, "your servant, colonel" thereby giving her the nickname "Colonel Anne".
Completely irrationally, that made me think of Aral and Cordelia from the Vorkosigan books and I was set.
2. I really loved Blood of Roses. Really really really. And this was part of the same 'trilogy' about the 1745 rebellion.
So yes, I read it and was addicted and loved it (even if a very small part of me wished I could read more more more about Alexander and Catherine Cameron from BoR). Anne is pretty much an amazing heroine - brave and strong-willed but not Mary Sueish - she has a temper, she jumps to conclusions, and she is embracing what a rational person should know is a lost cause. And her relationships with both her husband Angus and with Alexander John McGillivray, the man who leads the clan into battle (she may be a symbolic leader but she is not a military commander) are very very messily complicated - she may love her husband but they are separated for large chunks of the book (and for a long time not just by distance but by ideology) and you can see her tempted with her sexay sexay war chief (that whole relationship was pretty tragic tbh).
Canham normally writes (excellent) romance novels, but she seems to have dispensed with them for these books. BoR was only a romance novel under a very loose definition of the term and this really isn't one at all - is it romantic? Sure (I shipped Anne/Angus like whoa) but it pretty much takes every romance novel rule (including the cardinal one that the bulk of the book should be spent on the relationship) and stomps on it.
So, if you like historical fiction of romantic bent, check it out!
