Miss Blaines Prefect and The Golden Samovar by Olga Wojtas
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is utterly bonkers. The basic premise is that Shona Ferguson, a librarian in her mid-fifties in Edinburgh's Morningside, is sent back in time to some point in 19th-century Russia by Miss Marcia Blaine founder of the Marcia Blaine School for Girls. (The early part of the book covers the Prime of Miss Jean Brodie references.) Shona has no real idea what her mission is, simply that she has one.

Anyway, she ends up in the middle of serfdom Russia, although she can't work out an exact date. Is she to facilitate a romance between Lidia Ivanova and the dashing Sasha, or is she to work out if there's any foul play in the mysterious deaths of some of those around her? Is her own life in danger?

All this she has to work out while navigating the Scottish and Russian linguistic and cultural differences. But she does have, as her faithful assistant, "Old Vatrushkin", her own all-purpose serf comedy turn who is, naturally, not old at all.

More than that I won't say for fear of revealing too much. And the reader does have to concentrate quite a bit to avoid getting lost. There's a lot of 'Edinburgh' humour, and there are many historical and cultural jokes that I really enjoyed but might annoy others. Suspend belief on page one. But I laughed out a lot, though, which is always good, and it's a short book.

It's good to see this sort of genuinely funny book being given shelf-space. It belongs in the same category as James Hamilton-Paterson's "Cooking with Fernat Branca" (Gerald Samper and Shona Ferguson share a degree of insufferability, actually) and even a couple of my own novels. So I'm bound to like it.



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