Breakaway Books

Authored by Naina Kumar; Published July 2026; Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Just a Highland Fling tells you what it’s all about, right in the title. Unsurprisingly, the fling turns out to be much more complicated, and perhaps less fun, than anticipated for the characters and readers alike. 

Just a Highland Fling follows Neelu as she travels to Scotland, feeling dangerously ambivalent about attending her father’s second wedding. After a one-night stand immediately upon arrival, she feels just a little more ready, only to discover that Jacob, her partner in her night of fun, is part of her father’s wedding party. When Neelu’s dad’s fiancée jilts him at the altar, she is surprised to find herself on a journey through Scotland with her dad and Jacob to find her step-mom-to-be and bring them all back together. 

A spark was missing from this romance. Normally, I love romances like this one, where both members of the couple have to work on their own issues to find their happy ending. But in this case, it felt a little too much like drudgery to resolve their fears of abandonment. The only reason I can come up with behind that feeling is that it was missing the tension that rises throughout a book when two people are obviously attracted to each other but wait to consummate the attraction, due to whatever bizarre obstacles the author comes up with. With Neelu and Jacob, they immediately fall into bed, and it’s wonderful, even dream-like, but working back up to it feels inevitable, and therefore unimportant.

It’s not that Neelu and Jacob were hard to like: Who doesn’t love a poet-professor with as much sensitivity as Jacob? Neelu, of course, is a little harder, as a reality TV producer, but the author works hard to make her about as sympathetic as anyone who works in reality TV can be. The grief that pervades Jacob’s life can make him feel, at times, unapproachable, but I think that his evolution throughout the novel is realistic. And yet, I still can’t say that I had a passionate desire to see the two together–perhaps it all comes down down to how very little I believe in love at first sight. 

Just a Highland Fling will definitely give you Scotland vibes–kilts and bagpiping feature prominently. But if you’re looking for a romance that you just can’t put down, I can’t recommend this one.