Book Review | Nothing Left to Fear from Hell

I do love this series so far and I was excited to get to this one.

Nothing Left to Fear from Hell
Alan Warner

A BATTLE LOST.
A DARING ESCAPE.
A LONG WALK INTO OBLIVION.

In the aftermath of the catastrophic Battle of Culloden a lonely figure takes flight with a small band of companions through the wild, unmapped reaches, of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. His name is Charles Edward Stuart. He had come to take the British throne. Now he is on the run, hunted through a landscape that will never be his.

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Considering I am really enjoying the Darkland Tales and their exploration of Scottish History, I am constantly surprised by how little I know about it. I was excited to get to this story after hearing the author talking about it last year at a book festival but I realised very quickly how little I know of the story of Bonnie Prince Charlie.

I enjoyed the atmosphere in this book, you can get a sense of how bleak everything seems and how difficult it is for the Prince and his party as they make their way across the Scottish Highlands. At the same time though the party hadn’t lost their sense of fun and I did chuckle a few times at some of the remarks and I quite liked the contrast between that and the unforgiving conditions.

The one thing I did struggle a little bit with in this story was that characters that had been in the book were suddenly no longer in the Prince’s party, I realise the journey would have been long and not everyone would have possibly gone the whole way but they just kind of drop off without a mention again. I also sometimes found the language quite hard to discern, I’m usually good at picking up words in context even if I’ve not encountered them before but I didn’t find that quite as easy in this book.

I didn’t enjoy this instalment as much as I have the others in the series so far, it could be the fact that I don’t have much prior knowledge of the story and feel like I haven’t grasped what the significance of this voyage is, or it could be the way it is written. Don’t get me wrong it had many enjoyable moments, the diatribe from a maid towards the Irish spinner stands out as one such occasion, but I didn’t feel hooked by the story in quite the same way.