Love Over Scotland: Love Over Scotland: 44 Scotland Street Series (3)

True, this book is light reading but if you need something to lighten your mood I highly recommend this series. The ability to write seemingly effortless fiction is a gift that I don't disparage just because it isn't Hamlet. There is a need for all kinds of writing and humorous fiction is a type of writing that few do well. Love Over Scotland is the best of the three books so far and I found the adventures of Bertie to be hilarious. Admittedly, Bertie is a bit over the top but any insistence on believability would just ruin the fun. I look forward to more adventures...

By the time I turned the last page of this delightful installment with Matthew, Pat, Angus,Domenica, and dear sweet Bertie I was absolutely beaming. What I love so much about this series, and this book in particular is the transient nature of this place and these people. Yes, some characters are absent, but in their void are new people, and so like life we move with them. After finishing this there's little doubt in my mind that McCall Smith could write these individuals as long as his imagination let him. I for one would be more than happy to continue along for the witty, and oh so insightful ride into the many human conditions he touches so wonderfully on, the most prevalent being love.

There is so much that is wonderful about "Love Over Scotland" (or virtually any other Alexander McCall Smith book) that the reader wants to visit Edinburgh, look up the characters in the book and invite the author to dinner. All fantasy of course, but how many stories make you feel that way? "Love Over Scotland" is largely the light-hearted, clever and totally entertaining continuation of the sagas of Bertie the precocious and much-put upon six-year old; Matthew, the lovelorn and awkward twenty-something; Angus and Cyril, eccentric artist and faithful dog; and Domenica, the intrepid, field-tripping anthropologist. On the face of it, they don't sound promising as lead characters in a novel, but McCall Smith gives them voices that speak for the practice of love in its various forms--romantic, lustful, misguided, unrequited, etc. If the previous two books in the "44 Scotland Street" series provided regular chuckles from one page to the next, "Love Over Scotland" delivers frequent belly laughs through the author's gentle satire of modern parents, the perennial misunderstandings that take place between genders and the starchiness of the author's much-loved hometown of Edinburgh. McCall Smith takes a humorous poke at fellow Scot and Edinburgh favorite son, Ian Rankin (by name), which suggests the two writers are good friends (bitter rivals seems unimaginable). There is unending wit and wisdom in this book which ultimately leaves you hoping that the fourth episode in the series will be published very soon.

If you loved the other Scotland Street books, you will love this one. If you didn't, why are you reading this review? If you haven't read the earlier books, read their reviews first. I was introduced to this series by my 85-year-old mother, who is in a nursing home in Nebraska, and is still the world's best reader. She took great pleasure in reading "Espresso Tales" aloud to the only person for many miles who would fall out of her chair laughing at such arcane humor. Melanie Klein jokes, for heaven's sake! I admit it--the snob factor is a big one for me. I may not get the Edinburgh jokes, but I get the intellectual ones. I adore this series--I even like it better than the other McCall Smith series (I don't particularly like Isabel Dalhousie). I adore this book. My favorite part is written from the POV of Cyril, Angus Lordie's dog. Or maybe it's the bemused discussion of May 1968. Or the moment when the fireworks go off for Matthew. Or what I suspect is a send-up of a classic (and creepy) Melanie Klein transcript. Or... I guess I'll just have to read it again. Try reading this book aloud to someone simpatico. Or have someone with a great reading style (like my mother) read it to you. It's a lovely experience.

Alexander McCall Smith is the Charles Dickens of our day. We forget that Dickens wrote many of his novels as serials in magazines and this McCall Smith book was originally serialised in the Scotsman newspaper in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital where the plot is set. However, unlike Dickens, McCall Smith is a wonderfully enjoyable read, with none of the depressive quality of a Dickens novel. Not only that but in this, the third volume, many delightful things take place that bring happy resolution to some of the many fascinating sub-plots that readers have been pondering over the past few years. So for afficianados like me - and, I suspect hundreds of thousands of you - this is an espcially enjoyable novel! You can also visit Scotland Street! My wife and I recently did a McCall Smith tour of Edinburgh and had a wonderful time. These really are as good as the Botswana novels - read them with equal pleasure and be sure to tell all your friends. It will be an ideal gift for Christmas - and for Thanksgiving, for that matter, too. Christopher Catherwood (author of CHURCHILL'S FOLLY [Carroll and Graf] and of MAKING WAR IN THE NAME OF GOD [Citadel])