SCOTTISH KNIGHT, S. T. Cameron’s latest addition to the Young Explorers Adventure series sees the intrepid young explorer C. J. Kask journeying to early twentieth-century Scotland, where an archaeological investigation at a lord’s castle uncovers an ancient curse. It is a good, but not great, continuation of C.J.’s exploits. The weakest part of the book by far is the opening, which shows the trial and execution of Hestor, a witch in early modern Scotland whose fate is integral to the plot. There are numerous historical inaccuracies, which jars somewhat. The average reader might be forgiven for missing the anachronism of the setting – the year is 1537, but the earliest witch hunts we know of in Scotland would not occur for another twenty years or more. Rather more readers would treat with skepticism the witch trial, which is conducted by the local lord. It does not take an early modernist to intuit that Scotland, like most European countries at the time, had various church courts and other mechanisms that would have presided over the process, as indeed it did. The most egregious aspect of these opening chapters, however, is the anachronistic language. It is true that novelists, like screenwriters, are prevented from replicating English as it was spoken half a millennium ago for reasons of comprehension – if they were faithful to the language as it was actually spoken, readers would need copious footnotes on every page. Equally, however, lines such as “Oh, my – look who’s gonna die” should not find their way into the mouth of a Scot in the sixteenth century.
Cameron is on far firmer ground in the early twentieth century. For the most part, tired tropes relating to the cult of Scotophilia that left such a firm imprint in Romantic literature are avoided, and the author’s usual firm grasp of characterization is in evidence. The plot, however, is somewhat by-the-numbers: once a bewitched suit of armor is dug up, all manner of shenanigans follow, including the death of the present Lord MacGregor and the succession of his young son to the lordship, the whole framed by the lingering feud between descendants of the dead witch and the MacGregor family. What saves it from cliché is the fast pacing, and the surprising though not unwelcome foregrounding of characters other than C.J. to the action – this is perhaps the first novel in the sequence that truly justifies the “Young Explorers” tag attached to C.J. and his intrepid gang.
Though the plot is somewhat familiar, SCOTTISH KNIGHT offers a serviceable addition to S.T. Cameron’s Young Explorers series of YA adventure novels.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader