"A Strange Scottish Shore"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT  06426

Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                               November 22, 2017

“A Strange Scottish Shore” is a historical mystery authored under a pen names. Juliana Gray is my daughter-in-law Beatriz Williams. 

“A Strange Scottish Shore”

Juliana Gray

“In the space of an instant, I was hurtling backward, or forward,

 or upward, propelled toward some magnetic pole.”

                                                                                                A Strange Scottish Shore

                                                                                                Juliana Gray

Beatriz’s interest in history and mythology is combined in this story with her fascination for time travel. In the Author’s Note, at the end of the book, she explains her concept: “In my own head, time makes sense as kind of river flowing in one direction, and time travel as the ability to jump around to different points along that river.”

As in her previous novel, A Most Extraordinary Pursuit, we follow Emmeline Rose Truelove, a researcher for Arthur Maximilian Haywood (the Duke of Olympia). In this story, she travels to a castle on Scotland’s Orkney Islands to study an artifact, a suit of clothing, that had belonged to a Selkie who had risen from the sea to marry the castle’s first laird. Haywood is already there when she sets out. Emmeline is accompanied by Lord Silverton, a rakish and mysterious young man who is in love with her. The year is 1906. The story she tells, as was true in her first in this series, in based on a myth. In the first, it was the tale of the Minotaur and his labyrinth on the island of Crete. In this, the story is based on Selkies, mythological creatures who are seals in the water, but once on land shed their skins to become human. In western Scotland and Northern Ireland, tales of Selkies go back over two hundred years. This legend is explained in a rubric before each chapter: a quote from a book the Duke of Olympia will write in the future, in 1921 – “The Book of Time,” by A.M. Haywood.

Without providing details, I can tell you that Silverton disappears on the way north, and that Emmeline travels back 600 years to find him, in a manner plausible, at least to this reader. Silverton speaks, in almost fatalist fashion, of rules that govern our lives: “Everything’s guided by rules, isn’t it? Even the things we don’t understand. Our whole lives are spent trying to determine what the rules are.” I will not tell how the story ends, but don’t be surprised with the occasional spectral appearances of Queen Victoria and Emmeline’s recently-deceased father.