One of the best authors you have likely never heard of is Ann Scott Moncrieff. Yet another great writer to come out of Scotland, she lived a short yet rich life. This comes across in her books. She writes with youthful certainty and good humour. There is an exuberance about her writing that will add a spring to your step, and yet her characters have substance. She writes the story with a light hand, and yet the personalities you will meet there stay in your heart and enrich it.
The moral of her stories seems to be something like this: 'we don't have to live petty lives tied down to our mundane societies. Let us run free into the beautiful hills of our homeland'. She manages to carry this theme well, I believe, because she actually did this in her own life. Together with her husband and young children she moved to a simpler, faith-based life in nature.
But do not imagine that she is some boring surly-faced Thoreau. Her stories are uplifting, her characters are 'full of character' - compelling, some of them eccentric, colourful and beautiful, full of life like Ann herself. Her writing is also beautiful. She had an obvious talent for storytelling. A confident and able writer, her stories full of friendship, family, cheer, natural beauty, shared meals and rides on quirky vehicles. Her vocabulary is gorgeous. I particularly like how she mixes characters of all ages!
Her pages burst with life. If I could guess, her motto in life must have been: 'I am not dead yet, let's then be truly alive!'. Reading her books you will feel like you are running in the bonny flowing hills of Scotland with the wind in your hair; or that you are in love with a handsome courageous squirrel and you are sailing together full speed amidst Scotland's islets.
The reader can tell that Ann loved literature - both from the mastery she had over her craft, but also from the fruit that it bore in her life. Even though her children would have been very young when she passed away, she left behind her a family of book lovers, who are contributing in their own way to quality literature to this day. Her books today are published by a small notable publishing house in Edinburgh established by her granddaughter.
As I write this review we are approaching Pascha. Thinking over her short full, fruitful life, I can’t help but think that Ann Scott made a second escape from a mundane worldly place, to a land where she can truly run free and rejoice in life.
Firkin and the Grey Gangsters is my favourite of her books that I have read so far, since it has a several layers of depth. A great adventure, masterfully written, with exciting good guys and despicable bad guys, full of a love for nature. Everything you could wish for in a children's adventure story.
I might say that Ann's stories are a little immature, which is natural since she was writing as a young adult. But they are so well-written that one feels regretful that we did not have the opportunity to see what she would have written in her older years.
