NetGalley ARC | Clan Battles: Warfare in the Scottish Highlands in the Late Middle Ages

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐

This one is sort of unusual for me because I am typically bored to tears by any kind of warfare or military history. It's not interesting to me, I don't care about battle tactics, artillery, or anything having to do with that aspect of wars. I am far more interested in societal and cultural impacts of said wars.

That being said, I love Scotland so much, my daughter's middle name is Edin, (pronounced phonetically), because I love Edinburgh also SO MUCH (and naming her Eleanor Edinburgh seemed kind of mean). So, yes, I will read about clan battles in the Middle Ages because who wouldn't be interested in that kind of history?

I was familiar with most of the clans that the author discussed, but was delighted to get so much more detail than I expected, given the time period these battles occurred in (1430s-1540s). We see the Mackays, Sutherlands, MacDonalds, Mackenzies, Maclains, MacLeods, and Frasers at various times in that 100+ years, all vying for glory, dominance, land, revenge, and recognition.

The battles themselves were described in intense detail and at times you feel like you're there on the battlefield. We get all the things that typically do not interest me - strategies/tactics each clan employed, as well as their weapons and armor of choice. Not only are the battles recorded here for us, but so are the eventual fates of the clans as a whole and their eventual loss of independence, though the land had been theirs for hundreds of years in some cases.

The book runs a bit under two hundred pages, but the author has packed tons of research into it. Definitely recommended for those with an interest in the subject.