Lisa Berne's "The Laird Takes a Bride"

Lisa Berne read her first Georgette Heyer book at fourteen, and was instantly captivated. Later, she was a graduate student, a teacher, and a grant writer — and is now an author of historical romance.

Here she dreamcasts an adaptation of her latest novel, The Laird Takes a Bride:

I’m really bad at this sort of question, so really, the best I can do is to mention a film — and the actors — that influenced my thinking in The Laird Takes a Bride: the charming and deeply felt Leap Year. (Although, tangentially, in the interest of validating my taste, I feel obliged to add that I loathe the scene toward the end in which the protagonists carry on an extremely personal conversation in front of an interested crowd; such pointless contrivances are almost as annoying as the ones that take place in the rain. Case in point: Four Weddings and a Funeral.)

What drew me creatively to Leap Year is how the characters, winsomely portrayed by Amy Adams and Matthew Goode, are initially so shut off to each other — how enmeshed they are in their own damaged pasts. Both of my protagonists in The Laird Takes a Bride suffer from the same snare; their trajectories in this way mirror the other’s. They struggle to free themselves — to learn how to freely love — even as they resist their deepening connection.

So. Yeah. Matthew Goode and Amy Adams. With fetching Scottish accents. Could totally work.

Visit Lisa Berne's website.

--Marshal Zeringue