The Bertie Project

December 15, 2016
Forbidden love blooms at 44 Scotland St. (The Revolving Door of Life, 2016, etc.). Or perhaps sputters rather than blooms. Not that Edinburgh's most beloved block of flats doesn't encourage warm feelings, like portrait painter Angus Lordie's affection for his bride, anthropologist Domenica Macdonald--that's "Dr. Macdonald" to you--or 7-year-old Bertie Pollock's calm acceptance of everyone from his tormenting schoolmate, Olive, to his domineering mother, Irene. True love has even infected narcissistic Bruce Anderson, who's finally met his match in Clare Hodding, an Amazonian Australian with a fondness for extreme sports and a determination to turn Bruce into a hipster and marry him. Although Bertie's grandmother Nicola Tavares de Lumiares gets a summary notice of impending divorce from her husband, a Portuguese vintner smitten with his housekeeper, and romance continues to elude Big Lou, whose Coffee and Conversation Bar provides a welcome resting place for Angus and gallery owner Matthew Harmony, they take these disappointments with such equanimity that they barely register as disappointments at all. And the unexpected departure of Anna and Birgitte, the Danish au pairs Matthew and his wife, Elspeth, have engaged for their triplets, Tobermory, Rognvald, and Fergus, is followed by Bruce's equally unexpected suggestion that Clare would be the perfect replacement. Given the generally unruffled contentment, clandestine love is left to take root, in all places, in Bertie's father, henpecked statistician Stuart Pollock, who loses his heart to a young woman who's kind enough to give him a napkin when he spills soup at a vegetarian restaurant and who, above all, isn't his monstrous wife. Even woolier than earlier installments--two characters following a third suspected of adultery discuss the propriety of "alright" versus "all right," and another regular's fall from an upper-story window is accompanied by a summary of notable Scottish defenestrations--but just as affecting in its slow-burning way.

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Starred review from December 15, 2016
The 44 Scotland Street series began, 11 novels ago, as a cross-section of one upscale apartment building in Edinburgh, sort of a grown-up version of a doll's house. McCall Smith moved readers up and down the central stone staircase and into different apartments, including ones housing a statistician for the Scottish government, a domineering wife and mother, and their little boy; another that held a cultural anthropologist; and still another graced by a handsome narcissist and his crew of hopelessly adoring female flatmates. Things bubbled along, with people moving into and out of 44 Scotland Street and each other's lives. It was intriguing to see lives incrementally change from book to book, but the series was episodicuntil seven-year-old Bertie Pollock (he of the domineering drone-mother Irene) emerged, a few books ago, as the emotional center of Scotland Street. And now, Bertie, his statistician father, and Bertie's paternal grandmother are at the boiling point, each trying to gain freedom from what Irene has termed the Bertie Project, a relentless program of improvement for a little boy who is wonderful just the way he is. Freedom is the theme here (with a nice twist of Bruce the narcissist falling utterly under the thrall of a new woman). Longtime readers will love to see the masterful way McCall Smith brings things to a head, while newcomers will soon catch up and be entranced by this witty, wisdom-filled series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)