This is often called Scotland’s favourite book, and I get it. Published in 1932, it is fiction, but based so heavily on the author’s childhood in rural Scotland that his neighbours complained about it on publication. Like most books about childhood, and particularly rural childhoods, it is very much an elegy. It absolutely aches with a love of the Scottish countryside. It’s also very funny, capturing a wide range of local characters, often not in the most flattering way (thus the complaints)
It mostly tells the story of the coming to adulthood of a young woman called Chris Guthrie. One plot line that really surprised me, given the period, was her mother’s death. They had already four kids when she got pregnant with twins, and after they were born she told her husband she didn’t want any more children. He told her she would be thanking god for whatever ‘she was given.’ She later killed herself and the toddler twins, apparently because she found out she was pregnant again. Poor lady, she just couldn’t face it. And all this just because this guy didn’t want to pull out. Apparently the entire neighbourhood did go ahead and blame the husband, for ‘breeding his lie like a sow.’ This all seems very modern to me now, and apparently it did to people then too, as it caused quite a scandal. I can only say, thank god for birth control and divorce.
One point of interest is that the book is fairly difficult to read, because the author was trying to capture the ‘Scotch language’ in English form (so a ‘braw’ hat becomes a ‘brave’ hat). The glossary is forbidding. But I enjoyed it all the same.