Rob Roy (Wordsworth Classics)

It’s goooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooood🙂🙂🙂

This is a great Scottish novel, with all of the lovely scenery and steadfast heroes desired in this type of book. Even a bit of the Gaelic! I love the tragic character of Helen McGregor, and the classic brutal honor of Robert Roy. The scottish scenary is a vital character. I read this book when I was living in Glasgow, and the descriptions of the city's early days were amazing. I also fell in love with Loch Lomand.Modern readers be warned! This book was written in 1817, when attention spans were longer. The pace is slow, and the story takes awhile to unfold.I was riveted by this book and I highly recommend it

This book has it all: action, romance, intrigue, revenge, and an outlaw who's really not so bad after all. Although the book takes its title from the character of Rob Roy, you really don't meet him until two hundred pages into the story...or do you? Instead, the novel focuses on Francis Osbaldistone, which may be a little disconcerting for those readers who expect a rolicking adventure novel. For me, the most interesting character is that of Helen McGregor, Rob's wife. She seemed to be a shrew who controlled not only her husband, but the rest of the highlanders as well. All in all, though, the novel is a wonderful read, perfect for a Sunday afternoon.

Although the book is slow going at first, it is rewarding if you keep mind the time and place in which the story unfolds. Surprisingly, while Rob Roy is a major character, the book is mostly about Francis Osbaldistone, and the situation that he finds himself in. He is forced to act more responsibly, and in the process becomes a much stronger person. The plot twists of the book are one of it's best traits and keep things fresh. However, those expecting an action-packed adventure might be disappointed. Although the book does have some action, it focuses on the psychological more than it does the physical. The book proves that one doesn't have to have a larger than life persona, like Rob Roy's, to be a hero.

The narrative pace is Scott's, not ours, so Rob Roy requires some patience and a locale that encourages reflection. For readers in the Pacific Northwest, I would recommend reading it among the crags at Hidden Lake Lookout.A point of clarification: while the film versions of Rob Roy and Braveheart may be of similar vintage, they definitely do not portray the same eras in Scots history. The Highlander gentleman outlaw and cattle thief Robert MacGregor (Rob Roy) lived from 1671 to 1734, during the transition from Stuart to Hanoverian Britain that shed so much Highlander blood. Rob Roy's life was roughly contemporary with that the Old Pretender (James Francis Edward Stuart, 1688-1766), the "King Over The Water" of many a Scotsman's toast. His lifestyle was much like that of the fictional Doone clan in R. D. Blackmore's novel Lorna Doone, which is set in southwest England of the 1670s and 1680s: deprived of their own estates by wars and legal chicanery, both the Doones and the MacGregors lived by stealing livestock and preying upon the surrounding countryside.William Wallace ("Braveheart") lived (1270-1305) and fought much earlier in Scots history, in the times of Edward I "Longshanks" (1239-1307) and Robert I "the Bruce" (1274-1329), kings of England and Scotland, respectively. In a nutshell, "Braveheart" provides the background for Robert the Bruce's victory at Bannockburn, while "Rob Roy" sets the stage for the Duke of Cumberland's dragoons' massacre of Highland Scots at Culloden Moor, which crushed Bonnie Prince Charlie's uprising of 1745. "Braveheart" lies at the beginning, and "Rob Roy" at the end, of several centuries of Scottish self-rule.-Doug Johnson