The Unbearable Lightness of Scones

Starred review from November 9, 2009
Fans of bestseller Smith’s two mystery series set in Botswana and Edinburgh will find the same understanding, affectionate look at human frailties and foibles in this sunny series about the adventures and misadventures of a precocious six-year-old, Bertie Pollock, and a host of other folks in contemporary Edinburgh. In the superlative fifth entry (after The World According to Bertie
), Bertie’s parents engage in a Wodehousian power struggle about how their young child should be raised, wondering whether his desire to become a scout is a good thing. The neatly interwoven story lines include the travails of a young, newly married couple and an artist who finds himself saddled with too many dogs. One character’s scheme to recover a Spode tea cup that her neighbor has permanently appropriated is particularly evocative of P.G. Wodehouse, though Smith’s characters are less broadly drawn and more multidimensional than, say, Jeeves and Wooster.

March 29, 2010
The fifth book in McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street series re-visits the quirky characters of a tiny neighborhood of Edinburgh: aging Angus and his dog, young Matthew with his new bride, precocious six-year-old Bertie and his overbearing mother, and others. The dry humor and Wodehousian wit in the descriptions and observations of the eccentric characters give them charm, but the book is a study in ordinary people living ordinary lives, and the narrative is slow paced. Robert Ian Mackenzie's deep, sonorous voice is ideal for the exposition and the voices of the male characters, but that same rich masculine voice is a drawback when used for the dialogue of the female and child characters, who end up sounding stilted and impaired. An Anchor paperback (Reviews, Nov. 9).