The crux is this: doing your Serious Research by going on walking holidays with a tour guide is fine, and good for you for knowing what a bothy is, but details like knives in paintings and Pimm's feels like little more than smug window dressing when you couldn't do something as simple as Googling "Scotland tuition fees" or "Scotland health care". I'm aware that this book isn't meant to be particularly serious, but I can't maintain my integrity and say nothing on this. We're on the wrong side of the glass in this one. I still live in that city, so I can tell you, with all of my lived experience, that this book may be set in Scotland, but it is not written for a Scottish audience. I then moved to Canada (southern Ontario, for the scant handful of you who might be mildly interested), and moved back to Scotland when I was 20, to a city in the historic county of Angus. The wagon might be flying our flag, but nobody saved a seat for us.īefore anyone comes at me with their "well, actually", let me explain: I was born in a town on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, then moved to Fife, also Scotland, where I lived until I was 15. I'm not the target audience for this because it was written solely for an American audience. I'm still a sad sack of shit for stories about winsome teenage girls being hurled into unfamiliar situations and falling in forbidden love and bemoaning the fusty old adults who could never understand what it's like to be teens (it's not like we ever attended high school, or anything.
Do you guys remember how much I loved Anna and the French Kiss? I'm still here for that shit. And that's nothing to do with my age (alas, I'm a crusty old fogie of 24). It's because I'm not the target audience. Like I said, I wasn't expecting Kafka.Īfter finishing this, I know why I didn't like it. It's a bit weird, yeah, given the history of monarchy in Scotland, and the circumstances in which it came to be removed, but whatever. It's also not about people going back in time! That was pretty exciting to me, and I wasn't fussed about the "Crown Prince of Scotland" thing, since this is obviously AU. I was merely curious: it's the first book I've seen in a very long time that's set in Scotland but written by an American author, and it's not historical.
I wasn't looking for Homer's bloody Odyssey. I didn't pick up this book expecting it to rock my world.
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