"The Laird Takes a Bride"

Lisa Berne read her first Georgette Heyer book at fourteen, and was instantly captivated. Later, she was a graduate student, a teacher, and a grant writer — and is now an author of historical romance.

Berne applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Laird Takes a Bride, and reported the following:

My heroine, Fiona Douglass, has been forced to take part in a Bachelor-like situation, and is the only candidate who despises the very idea of it. At this particular interval in the story, she’s riding her horse away from an ancient monastery, to which she and a large party have traveled on a sightseeing jaunt. She’s mulling over the events of the day. At 27, she is, in 1811, very much in “old maid” territory, and wonders uneasily if jealousy motivated her, earlier, to engage in some sharp badinage with a much younger woman.

She’s also recalling some of the things said by a little girl she’s recently met, who has an unnerving tendency to utter opaque, sibylline remarks — The Laird Takes a Bride is set in Scotland, and this is a tiny, tiny tip of the hat to Macbeth’s Three Witches — and she’s puzzling over their significance.

We see Fiona, then, on a kind of temporal pivot: she’s thinking about what happened today, she’s musing about the past and questioning if her best years are behind her, and is also wondering, with some apprehension, what the future will bring.

So is page 69 representative of the book as a whole? To a large degree, yes, as it portrays my heroine as a thinking, feeling human being who’s struggling to make sense of her life. But it doesn’t happen to also reveal the story’s fluid point of view which offers insight into the psyche and circumstances of Fiona’s counterpart, Alasdair Penhallow. You’d have to back up to page 66 for that, or read on to page 72...

Visit Lisa Berne's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Laird Takes a Bride.

--Marshal Zeringue