I don’t usually enjoy coming-of-age novels, but this one features a character simultaneously so pitiable and admirable that she is hard to resist. Janet is born into an upper middle class Scots family where she never quite fits in: her mother only likes babies, so she proceeds to have several more, and anyway Janet is a disappointment in the girlhood area. Her hair is untamable, and although she loves to read, she’s unsuccessful at school because of the other girls, who alternately mock or ignore her. She loves Achnasaugh, the castle left to her father, and animals, so much so that her overweening sympathy for them creates one more reason for practical farming people to question her sanity. She suffers from carsickness and migraines, and honestly there’s no indication that anyone in her life feels any affection for her whatsoever. We know from the first pages that she’ll be murdered at sixteen, knowledge that makes her short life even more poignant. ‘O Caledonia’ is a character study that belongs to the best gothic tradition of novels that remind us what women and girls put up with—the ridiculous social rules and expectations, the abuse at the the hands of men, the narrowed life paths—and yet we create beauty and spirit in whatever way we can.