With thanks to NetGalley and Canongate Books for the ARC.
This is the story of the author, Kate Grenville’s, grandmother and her difficult upbringing and life in late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Australia. The book has been longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024, but I have to admit that I am a little puzzled as to why. Grenville has a very accessible writing style, and the story trips along at a pace, but, BUT, the tale itself is fairly unremarkable. I found the narrative to be repetitive – Dolly’s restlessness and drive to move on to somewhere (anywhere!) else basically followed the same trajectory each time – buy a business, improve it, get bored, sell the business, move on – and the repetition of this same pattern grew tedious and made the book seem much longer than the 256 pages the printed hardback edition has.
The publisher describes the book as ‘subversive’, the story of a woman who was determined to push against the doors that society closed to females and to search for love and independence. Yes, there is an element of that in the narrative, but ultimately, to me, this just felt like the sad story of an intelligent but largely unlikeable woman who railed against the frustrations and barriers she’d faced in her life, but didnt develop the self-knowledge or reflective skills to avoid repeating the same mistakes with her own family. There was little sense of character or plot development – just a nicely told depiction of hard lives and times that will appeal to readers who like historical family dramas but which didn’t really work for me.
That Gothic Book 