Untamed is the second book in Pamela Clare’s MacKinnon’s Rangers series. This book is re-released from 2008 and has extra material added. According to Clare’s website, this new version of Untamed features “25 pages of restored content along with a fresh edit”.
Set in North America during the French and Indian War of the 18th century, Morgan MacKinnon is Scottish but he’s a Ranger for the British when he is wounded and captured by the French. Being nursed and cared for by the virgin Amalie, Morgan slowly begins to heal and come back to life. But the young Amalie must come to terms with the grief this man may have caused her, and is it possible all the rumors about the murdering and ruthless MacKinnon’s Rangers are true?
Pamela Clare is one of my favorite authors. She just has a way of putting words together that is so beautiful, interesting, vivid, and downright sexy. One of the things I love most about Clare’s work is it is clearly evident she invests a lot of time in doing research for making her subject matter both accurate or so relevant like with her I-Team series. If you check out her website you can read about some of the real life events that characters or situations in her books are based on.
In Untamed I enjoyed both the heroine and the hero. Their passion felt real to me. I believed in them. I thought they worked well together. I believed in the story too. But something was just off for me in this one. I can’t quite put my finger on it and I wish that I could. Was it the over 100 pages it took to get to some good steamy scenes? Maybe. The story seemed to go on for quite a long time with a lot of buildup but not a lot of forward motion in the plot and I kept thinking there’s only 200 pages left to go, let’s get this thing going. I stand by my statement that this book still is beautiful prose and Clare creates vivid scenes that I feel as if I have my nose pressed to the window screen, watching and listening to everything going on instead of just reading it. But I guess overall it just felt a little sluggish to me. Perhaps if you like a romance with a slow build, this is the perfect book for you. I did overall find it to be a good and entertaining read (yet 18th century frontier life is brutal!), but I had a few moments of thinking, “Okay, let’s get to book 3 with the brother Connor MacKinnon. So ready for his story.”
As usual though Pamela Clare gives us one hell of an epilogue and it did not disappoint one bit. WOW is all I can about those 9 pages. Just….wow.
Favorite Quote:
Morgan chuckled, “You Frenchman fight wi’ wee sabers, aye? We Highland Scots carry broadswords. They ne’er fail us.”
Rating: C
Untamed by Pamela Clare
January 3rd 2012 by Berkley Sensation
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About Samantha
I love her I-Team series but still have not read one of her historical novels as of yet. I definitely plan to soon. Nice review Samantha.
It doesn’t bother me if it takes a long time to get to the steamy parts, but if the rest of the story doesn’t move along I can loose interest. But the epilogue comment makes me curious…
Nice review Samantha. I still have not read any of her books, but I have heard good things about her shifter books. So she is somewhere on the TBR. But this series sure sounds good as well, been a while since I have reading something in this time period.
Nice review Samantha. I have read this author. I think I’ll start with her I-Team series. It has nothing at all to do with the covers. Nothing.