Setting: an old country house in NE Scotland during the 1990s

First Line: I knew when I married the man that I married the mansion.

First off, for anyone who wants to know how to pronounce the name of the book, "The Guynd" rhymes with "the wind".

This memoir offers an American woman's view of rural Scotland today. It is an account of the author's marriage and her years spent at The Guynd, her husband's ancestral estate. She has a steep learning curve when it comes to dealing with a grand and crumbling mansion, an overgrown landscape, troublesome tenants, local aristocracy, Scottish rituals and a husband for whom change is anathema. A son and heir draws Belinda Rathbone into an intimate relationship with every tier of local society, while a visiting friend heightens the strain of the culture gap. Rathbone digs into family and local history in an effort to understand her surroundings and free her husband from the grip of the past. She was unsuccessful.

In reading the book, I never felt that Rathbone was deeply in love with her husband, and if I'm feeling cranky I'd say that she married the man so that she could have the house, for she did love it--a shambles of a Georgian manor house built in 1799 and being allowed to fall to bits because the past several generations of the family concentrated so fiercely on the past that they lost almost complete contact with the present and the future. The book shines most brightly when Rathbone describes the improvements she managed to make to the place despite her husband's fighting her every step of the way. I also learned a lot about Scottish society and how to pronounce quite a few words correctly. When I finished the last page, I couldn't help but think that the author's dream of being the Martha Stewart of Scotland gang badly a-gley. ( )