Sunshine on Scotland Street

July 15, 2014
An eighth season of charminglyfeatherweight escapades, moral dilemmas, and errors committed and corrected andsometimes simply brushed aside by the denizens of 44 Scotland St. and itsEdinburgh environs. Miraculously, anthropologistDomenica Macdonald succeeds in marrying painter Angus Lordie even though Angushas made no arrangements for a wedding ring or a honeymoon or the gaping holein the kilt he plans to wear. No sooner has the happy couple taken their vowsthan the best man, gallery owner Matthew Harmony, is approached by Bo, afilmmaker who's a friend of his triplets' au pair, Anna, who wants to film afly-on-the-wall documentary of Matthew's absolutely normal family, which he'sconvinced Danish audiences will love. Bertie Pollock, the 6-year-old to whomAngus entrusts his beloved dog, Cyril, while he's away, has to deal with thefact that his mother, Irene, doesn't want a dog in the house. Convinced thatsomething ails Cyril, she starts him in psychotherapy, and Bertie contemplatesprotective measures that are bound to backfire. Bertie's father, Stuart, inchescloser to confronting his misgivings about the uncanny resemblance of his babyson Ulysses' ears to those of his wife's former therapist, Dr. Hugo Fairbairn, now prudently decamped to Aberdeen. And in the most inventive of the plots thatswirl and churn and then dissolve, narcissistic surveyor Bruce Anderson meetshis exact physical double, a man who would certainly be his long-lost twinbrother if he had one, and Jonathan proposes a mad scheme Bruce unaccountablyaccepts. A tighter focus on fewer charactersthan the earlier installments (Bertie Plays the Blues, 2013, etc.) doesn't pay offin additional depth or sharper conflict but generates more serial complicationsper capita for a crew that's endlessly open to adventures while remainingimmitigably themselves.

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Starred review from June 1, 2014
In his Scotland Street series, now in its eighth installment, McCall Smith follows a core group of people, all of whom once lived in or very near the same Edinburgh apartment house (44 Scotland Street). We watch as they do things everyone does, like fix dinner, quarrel, match wits, and fall in love, but also as they do things only people in Edinburgh can, like shop at the farmers market held on Saturdays beneath the volcanic crag of Edinburgh Castle. And McCall Smith does something else here, even beyond what he does in his popular No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. He gives us each of his characters' points of view, moving deftly from one to the other. So, for example, we often get the point of view of six-year-old Bertie, oppressed son of Irene, who sees her son as a project. Bertie yearns to be 18 and move to Glasgow, forever away from Irene. We also tap into Irene's brain, her harassed husband's, and some of Bertie's classmates, along with Bruce the narcissist, Angus the portrait painter, and Angus' beloved dog, Cyril. McCall Smith does this very deftly, advancing the action (this latest has a wedding, a doppelgnger, and the continuing adventures of Matthew and Elspeth and the triplet infants) as we learn exactly what characters are thinking of each other and themselves. Humor and insight abound.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)