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The Guynd: A Scottish Journal
Belinda Rathbone
#UB6452
Paperback, 289 pages; 2007
$14.95
 Members' Price: $12.71
I knew when I married the man that I married the mansion. Though which would pose the greater challenge—my husband John, or his crumbling Georgian country house in northeast Scotland—there was no telling.
At age thirty-nine, American Belinda Rathbone met fifty-three-year-old Scotsman John Ouchterlony at a cousin's 1990 wedding in Vancouver. They hit it off, and so he invited her to visit him at his family's ancestral home in the Scottish Highlands. She was stunned—intrigued by the inherent beauty of the place, called the Guynd (she says it rhymes with "the wind"), and shocked by its state of neglect and disrepair. As she boarded her plane back to New York, John blurted out, "It's all yours if you want it!" And so she plighted her troth—with both the man and his mansion. This is not one of those silly genre books about acquiring property abroad and having a jolly old time fixing it up. Instead, Rathbone has written a sensitive, thoughtful, and engaging memoir about the difficulty of effecting change, be it in middle-aged husbands or centuries-old houses.
(EE)
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