Stevenson is very underrated 

fuck it catriona five stars. i’m only slightly biased by the fact this is like, the only catriona representation i had growing up, and even though i’m only just reading it now, knowing it existed was a lot of comfort to a lonely young catriona that was me, during my childhood in cold and uncaring england.

anyway, i do have one sole complaint which is that catriona herself is utterly failed by the book for a good chunk, becoming unbearably naïve in the middle there. the introduction to the canongate edition at least gives a good explanation as to why. and luckily stevenson resets the course by the end, so that she gets a bit sharper, and her innocence becomes more interestingly used for romantic misunderstandings, so the book ends on a high.

otherwise, what fun! what a genre piece. you have the adventure romping of kidnapped, but also political conspiracy, historical romance, legal thriller now mixed in. stevenson is such a compelling writer, and i rate him hugely. i massively liked how much of this is set in edinburgh (and that i generally know scotland better than i did when i read kidnapped), because it’s lovely to see the excitement happen on a field i recognise. david’s whole thing is ‘what if a normal guy had the best, coolest friends imaginable’ and that remains a really fruitful setup: miss grant is an excellent addition to the cast. a small thing, but i also adore how he lapses into dialect the minute he meets anyone who speaks the least bit scots: true, nice, and made me extremely sad about what’s happened to scottish language - great stuff! and loved the last page,

what a great reveal of what this narrative is, what a cute end, what a nice way to know everyone is well.

I ended up kind of mixed on this. It's certainly not Kidnapped, and, Christ on a Bike, is the romance tedious, and there isn't strictly speaking a plot, so much as Davie just plodging around northern Europe, and stuff that was direly important in the first half doesn't get mentioned in the second half, and honestly it's just not very good, but also the handful of chapters with Alan Breck Stewart make me entirely glad to have read it. There are some wonderful absolutely peak Alan bits, and interactions with Davie that are both hilarious and immensely sweet. So for Alan's sake, I'd consider it worth a read. 

I'll bet a lot of people here have read Kidnapped, but few will have read it together with its second half Catriona. This I attempted, only to find out for myself why it isn't often done. For a brief recap, Kidnapped is the story of David Balfour whose scheming uncle has him abducted; he escapes (details omitted, no spoilers) and later is falsely implicated in a murder and has to flee from the forces of the law. At the end of the novel he satisfactorily deals with his uncle, but the issue of the murder is unresolved, with an innocent man on trial and possibly able to be saved by Balfour's testimony, if he could give it... The book breaks off almost in the middle of a paragraph. I don't know why Stevenson couldn't finish it at the time, but when he finally did, seven years later, the result was rather a mess. In my opinion the work as a whole is what's known as a "curate's egg." Catriona resolves the trial business at considerably more length than necessary; that section has the merit of interestingly continuing some political themes that were touched on in the first volume, but it's diffuse. It's even interrupted by a stay on an isolated island, not uninteresting but a digression, and the telling of a lengthy folktale... And to roll even more genres into one novel, there are some not-too-interesting attempts at the comedy of a naive young man in good society, and after the trial concludes, a long and wearisomely Victorian love story. That last was what finally forced me to stop reading 80% through. It's too bad, because I think I can see the outlines of an effective conclusion to Kidnapped that would have included about 1/3 of the material in Catriona, somewhat rearranged. Even the love story could have contributed; it could have tied in nicely to the political and cultural themes of the book, if shorn of a vast amount of piffle. Oh well, no use regretting the great novel that could have been; I'll do as most people do, read Kidnapped and imagine how it should end.