I've just finished reading two books by Pat MacIntosh, The Harper's Quine and The Nicholas Feast. Both are excellent, and I own the third in the series, so I will probably read it.

BUT. I have a criticism. The books are full of Scots words with which I am unfamiliar and I cannot extrapolate the meaning from the context. I'm not talking about words like 'bairn' and 'kirk,' which are familiar to most readers. I'm listing words which require that I refer to a dictionary:

quine
bannock
pend
good-sister
yett
comfit
gar
strunt
taigle
driddle
wheesht
sneisty
beffan
stushie
vennel
teinds
con
yirdit
grat

To be fair, I have a general idea about bannock, good-sister, and comfit. But the others are beyond me. 'Con' does not mean what it means in English, that much was clear from the context.

I wish the author had included a single glossary page for those of us who like to read more deeply than a simple skim for plot, or who are American English speakers, unfamiliar with Scots. I think she'd be a lot more popular in this country if it weren't for the heavy load of Scots/Gaelic words and phrases.

It would also have been nice if the maps included had had reference points on them corresponding to key places in the plot. The map in the second book is much better than that in the first. The second volume also has a listing of the early people involved in the University of Glasgow, indicating who was a real historical figure and who a dramatis persona.

It always helps when there are several important characters to list them for the reader (who is then saved the work of marking up the fly leaves herself).

Now that I've looked up the Scots words and learned their definitions, I might as well go ahead and order the fourth in the series as well....

update: some of the words have no meaning to be found on the web; after looking in several dictionaries, I'm stumped. Must be slang or Gaelic words, transliterated into English.


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