JUST A HIGHLAND FLING

A Scottish road trip brings new love and heals old wounds.

Neelam Pillai is a Tamil Indian American reality TV producer who’s in Aberdeen for her estranged father’s wedding. A one-night stand with a hot Malayali Indian Scottish stranger before meeting up with her father and his fiancée seems like a harmless idea. To her surprise—though not any romance reader’s—the stranger turns out to be in the wedding party. Jacob Cherian, a bespectacled, bagpipe-playing literature professor, is a close acquaintance of both bride and groom. Startled, and grappling with unresolved feelings about her father’s seeming years of neglect, a tipsy Neelu says something unwise to his fiancée, triggering her flight. This begins a road trip across Scotland in pursuit of the runaway bride, with Neelu, her dad, and Jacob sorting through long-standing griefs and false assumptions and trying to grow past them into loving bonds. The chemistry between the romantic protagonists leaps off the page, though their parental losses—hers involving her parents’ divorce and his resulting from his parents’ deaths—compete significantly with the romantic plot. Neelu is also at a professional crossroads, having tired of the formulaic dating show she’s been producing for years. Jacob is somewhat risk averse, thanks to his best friend’s untimely death, complicating a potential future with Neelu—but the forced proximity of driving across the country is starting to change his outlook. The road-trip stops around Scotland are a bit twee, with sex scenes and parental confrontations bookended by funerals and weddings, bagpiping and heather bouquets. An epilogue neatly brings all of Neelu’s personal and professional hopes together after a seemingly mandatory crisis of faith about a long-distance relationship with Jacob. The combination produces a story that is less in the strict romance mode, edging more into women’s romantic fiction. The characters are clearly etched and memorable, though the original poetry written by both protagonists is best forgotten.

An enjoyable jaunt with Indian American and Indian Scottish protagonists that bridges their pasts and new horizons.