Believe!

Have you ever felt that your life might have just gone up an octave?

Callum and the Mountain is not your run of the mill book for children.

Callum and the Mountain is a book perhaps aimed at children who’ve crossed the bar of age 9 but have yet to enter the choppy waters of adolescence. I left that demographic more decades ago than I care to remember and I thought this book delightful and thought provoking. It’s unusual; yet accessible. It can be read with pleasure by young and old alike.

It’s written at a brisk pace. Not breathless, but brisk. You’ll not be bored. The opening pages of the book get off to great start: with the 'explosive' destruction of the local school - a dream I'm sure every child has engaged with at some point in their young lives. Be careful what you wish for Callum because off we go.

The pace is ‘helped’ in the audio edition by sound effects which personally I don’t care for - I would call them ‘noise effects’ - but they’re a bit unobtrusive and do help drive the action.

Mr McClure’s use of the written language is sublime. There’s not a word wasted. Jargon alert: Everyone in the book speaks ‘age appropriate language’. None of the children sounded like 35 year old school pupils. The author understands how children speak to each other and how the old speak (or not) to each other and how the generations speak to each other.

Callum the protagonist is friends with or meets in the course of the narrative characters we the reader soon come to care about. Even some of the characters I might not wish to invite to my birthday party - still, I cared about them.

We want to know - what’s going to happen next?

At parts of this book the author will take us by the hand and lead us all into an unreal, but yet very real other world. Using visual language (and a good smattering of guid Scots wirds) he helps all to expand our minds to believe in Callum and his friends and fellow tounsfolk. Believe, that strong imbedded command, is always waiting in the wings and by the half way point I was a believer. Believe, believe, believe.


Believe in Callum and the Mountain. There’s action; there’s suspense. There’s storm; there’s drama. There’s death; there’s life. There’s decay; there’s renewal. There’s an old way; there’s a new way. It’s a story which teaches us about diversity in life and balance in nature as well as love and acceptance. It’s a great story of love across the generations.

It’s certainly got me thinking more about what we don’t see and what we think we see. What we hear and what we don’t hear. And to use the Aberdeen dialect expression ‘Fit’s important and fit’s nae’.

Callum and the Mountain is a marvellous book. I commend it to you and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

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