Loving the Highlander

Janet Chapman wrote contemporary and time travel paranormal romance with a distinctive Maine and Scottish flavor across more than thirty novels before her death in 2017. Her Pine Creek Highlanders series, which Loving the Highlander fits into, was one of her most popular ongoing projects. The premise is built around a group of medieval Scottish warriors who, through a magical accident, find themselves transported into modern Maine, where they have been quietly building new lives over several generations.

The time travel premise gives Chapman room to write the kind of fish out of water scenes that make this subgenre fun. The Highlanders have to deal with cars, cell phones, modern American social customs, and the strange experience of being a few hundred years older than they look. The romances develop between these displaced warriors and the modern Maine women who slowly figure out that their new neighbors are not quite who they claim to be. Chapman handled the time travel elements with affection rather than over explanation, treating the magical premise as a starting point and getting on with the romance and the small town drama that her readers came for.

What distinguishes Chapman from other writers in the Highlander romance subgenre is the contemporary Maine setting. Most Scottish time travel romance keeps either or both of its lovers in the medieval Scottish setting, but Chapman planted her warriors firmly in modern small town America and let them adapt. The result is a series that reads as much like contemporary small town romance as it does like paranormal historical, and her readers loved the combination.

For readers who enjoy Karen Marie Moning’s earlier Highlander novels, the Highlander romances of Donna Grant or Hannah Howell, or the small town contemporary work of Robyn Carr, Janet Chapman is squarely in the relevant neighborhood. Loving the Highlander is one of the entries in her ongoing series and a comfortable read for fans of the subgenre. Her catalogue is now part of the historical record of paranormal romance in the early twenty first century.