Review: 100 Years of Betty by Debra Oswald

100 Years of Betty isn’t high-brow literary fiction and it doesn’t need to be. It’s warm, engaging, and I really enjoyed it. From the first chapter I connected with Betty, not because I’ve lived her life or even experiences 1/3 of what she has, but because Debra Oswald writes her with such humanity that you feel you could bump into her at the shops and strike up a chat.

Betty’s life begins in wartime London, a childhood shaped by the chaos and fear of the Blitz and the slow disintegration of her family under the strain of war and poverty. As a young woman she migrates to Australia in search of something more and begins (bravely in my mind) begins to build a new life in an unfamiliar country. Across the decades we see her navigate love and loss through multiple marriages, raise her children, and weather the quiet triumphs and disappointments that come with time. Betty's life is one of resilience and reinvention. 

One of the things Oswald does beautifully is show the role of chance in our lives. I once heard (and I wish I could remember where) that life is essentially a set of experiences that we tell ourselves stories about, so we can understand and ourselves better. It's an idea that's always struck me and I keep in mind when I am experiencing something challenging or stressful. That idea threads through Betty’s life. She makes choices but she’s also shaped by accidents, encounters, and the circumstances she finds herself in. Looking back, she pieces these moments together into her own narrative, and we see her come to understand who she is.

Reading it felt a little like a time travel novel except we move through time in the right direction. We watch Betty live through decades of change, each new era bringing shifts in social expectations, opportunities, and challenges. I felt joy and heartbreak watching her grow into her true self across all those years, especially as the world around her changes. We particularly see this shift almost immediately after her children are grown and she travels for the first time, moving to another content, to form connections and create a new family for herself, for a time. This moment felt to me like the most jarring or abrupt development in her character. I understand the change is big and abrupt because of the point in her life where she is free, without the responsibility of caring for her children, to finally put herself and her interests first.

One of the storylines that particularly resonated with me was about forced adoption. In a previous role, I worked in a not-for-profit organisation that supported people separated through forced adoption, and the emotions in this part of the book rang true. Oswald captures the pain, the complexity, and the lifelong impact without turning it into melodrama.

At its heart, this is also a story about women’s liberation. It shows how women have seen ourselves over time, how society has seen us over time, and how we have come to expect more from our lives. Through Betty, we see those changes unfold in small, everyday ways. Her confidence shifts, she becomes self-reliant and she knows she deserves and then expects respect.

And who doesn't doesn't love an elderly lady willing to experiment with hallucinogens. 

100 Years of Betty comes highly recommended by me.

Review: The Good People by Hannah Kent

Hannah Kent is one of my favourite authors. I’ve read all of her novels and her memoir. I love the way her writing seems to inhabit a time and place so completely that you can feel as though you are there. When you read her books you can see the world she describes, feel the damp air in your lungs, and experience the feelings and thoughts of the characters, right down to their bones. I saw her speak recently at the Sydney Writers’ Festival and she was just as lyrical and insightful in person as she is on the page.

But The Good People was, surprisingly, my least favourite of her books.

Set in rural Ireland in the 1820s, the story follows Nora, Mary, and Nance, whose lives become entangled through the care of a Nora's sickly young grandson, Micheal after Nora's husband unexpectedly passes away. Nora comes to believe that the “good people” (fairies) might be to blame for his condition, and the women take increasingly desperate steps to help him. 

Kent’s writing is, as always, richly atmospheric. She describes peat smoke curling from the hearth, mist hanging over green valleys, the smell and feeling of the wet and damp earth, and the rhythms of rural life in a way that feel so authentic that you can almost imagine that you are living them yourself. 

The book has a very slow pace which fits this setting. We experience the pace of a rural village in the Irish past and observe the seasonal change and the unchanging superstitious belieds of the community.  But for me, the pace felt a little too slow. I found myself skipping ahead a few pages here and there (and then sheepishly going back because guilt wouldn’t let me cheat properly). I didn’t connect deeply with any of the characters, which made the unhurried unfolding of events harder to settle into. In her other novels, I’ve always found a character or a thread of emotion that I have connected with. Here, I just didn't care as much as I needed to to remain in the story.

The ending also didn’t quite land for me. Without giving too much away, it felt oddly abrupt and left me feeling unsatisfied. That may well have been Kent’s intention, after all, the story is based on a real historical case, but I missed the sense of emotional connection that I’ve come to expect from her.

Still, even a Hannah Kent novel that doesn’t quite work for me is a novel worth reading. The writing alonehas the ability to embed you in a historical moment and I admire this so much in her books. If I had to summarise The Good People, I would say that it is a slow-burn immersion into a past world where folklore and reality blur, but for me it lacked the heartbeat that made Burial Rites and Devotion so unforgettable.

And now, having read all of Hannah Kent’s books, I’m left with the realisation that I’ll have to wait for her to write another before I can lose myself in her words again.

Six Degrees of Separation (Aug): From The Safekeep to Australian Poems to Read to the Very Young

 The meme is hosted by Books are My Favourite Best and is described thus: On the first Saturday of every month, a book is chosen as a starting point and linked to six other books to form a chain. Readers and bloggers are invited to join in by creating their own ‘chain’ leading from the selected book. Each person’s chain will look completely different. It doesn’t matter what the connection is or where it takes you – just take us on the journey with you.

This month we start with the 2025 Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.  

I read this very recently and you can read my review here. 

The book is described:

An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge – for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan’s Atonement. It is fifteen years after the Second World War, and Isabel has built herself a solitary life of discipline and strict routine in her late mother’s country home, with not a fork or a word out of place. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season… In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate need for control reaches boiling point. What happens between the two women leads to a revelation which threatens to unravel all she has ever known.

First stop: Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. I've chosen a classic gothic novel here. The unnamed second Mrs. de Winter arrives at Manderley and is haunted (metaphorically) by the presence of Rebecca. This is perhaps my favourite book. Like The Safekeep, it's about a woman’s identity blurring and a house filled with heavy memories. My review. 

Second stop: The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters. Another mystery unravelling in a British manor, this one falling into decay and, like The Safekeep, set after the war. A doctor becomes entangled with a family struggling with a perceived haunting. My review.

Third stop: The Secret River by Kate Grenville. I'm not quite sure why this one came to mind next. It brings us to early Australian invasion history, where a man stakes a riverbank and builds a life on stolen lands. I think perhaps it's the wilful ignorance and moral consequences of theft that connects the books in my mind. There is definitely a common theme of moral reckoning across history. My review.

Fourth stop: The Timeless Land by Eleanor Dark. The Timeless Land expands the scope to a broader historical setting. While The Secret River offers an intimate perspective on one family’s journey, Dark’s novel provides a sweeping account of the first years of British invasion from multiple viewpoints, including the Aboriginal peoples. Like Grenville, Dark grapples with the complex legacies of settlement and challenges the dominant narratives of Australian history. I was actually interviewed on Radio National about this book. My review. 

Fifth stop: Blinky Bill by Dorothy Wall. The Timeless Land holds a special place in my own history. It was my grandmother’s favourite book; one she treasured and reread many times. This personal connection leads me to Blinky Bill, another Australian classic, but from a very different angle. Blinky Bill is a children’s story centred on the adventures of a mischievous koala, embodying a playful and irreverent spirit of one type of Australian childhood. The copy I have belonged to my grandmother, linking these two books through family.

Sixth stop: Australian Poems to Read to the Very Young. From the whimsy of Blinky Bill, for me the chain naturally moves to Australian Poems to Read to the Very Young. This collection of poems is deeply embedded in my own childhood memories, and I can still recite many by heart. Like Blinky Bill, it evokes a sense of place and identity shaped by the landscape and language of Australia. Just reading one of these poems returns me to special moments in my childhood.

For good measure, click here to see what in read in July. 

Review: The Safe Keep by Yael Van Der Wouden

This one really got under my skin.

The Safe Keep is one of those books that creeps up on you. It’s set in the Netherlands not long after WWII, and the whole thing feels steeped in silence and tension. In other words, it’s not fast-paced, but you can feel from the opening that there is a sense of unease in the story that it clearly building toward something. 

The story follows Isabel, who’s living alone in her family's home, a large family home in the country side filled with memories that Isabel can't and doesn't want to escape. She’s somewhat cut off from the world, emotionally and practically. There is almost a faint agoraphobia or at the very least severe anxiety feel to the way that Isabel lives. That is, until Eva turns up - her brother’s fiancee, who comes to stay with Isabel. From the moment the two meet in a restaurant, you can feel the tension between them. Isabel immediately feels that Eva is hiding something. Eva appears confident and curious, but at the same time is a little hard to pin down. The dynamic between the two women is intense from the beginning. They are watchful of each other but there is always a sense of something deeper going on underneath for them both. 

The relationship between Isabel and Eva is full of tension, and part of that tension is sexual. Initially, it’s not labelled, and nothing is spelled out too directly, but increasingly there’s an undeniable undercurrent of desire between them. I liked the way the novel handled this. Their attraction is just there in the characters and the way they move around each other. It’s messy, complicated, and laced with repression which is exactly right for the time period and the emotional tone of the book.

The other thread I found really fascinating was the one about postwar theft and hidden complicity. There’s this idea bubbling under the surface that after the war ended, not everyone came out of it clean. Some people took advantage of others misfortune, knowingly or with wilful ignorance. There’s a growing sense that Isabel’s family may have benefitted from things that were never really theirs. That kind of moral murkiness adds a lot of depth to the story. It’s not just about personal memory or trauma, it’s also about national memory and who gets to tell the story of what happened.

The writing is spare and controlled and full of atmosphere. There’s something unsettling about the way van der Wouden builds the story. I felt like I was waiting for something awful to happen, even when everything was quiet. And when the reveal does come, it sinks in almost with a bit of a sickening feeling. The ending is quietly devastating, but at the same time hopeful and so I was left with a haunted feeling I actually really appreciate in a book.

This will be a challenging read for some people. It’s ambiguous and emotionally chilly at times but if you like a book with complicated female characters and moral grey zones that leaves you slightly off balance, The Safe Keep is absolutely worth your time.

July 2025: What I Read

In truth it hasn't been much of a reading month. I was interviewing for a new job and not feeling very enthused in my current job. My daughter and I came down with the flu, which made concentrating on books very challenging and just over all I wasn't super feeling it. 

This means that my reading essentially fell into two categories: New Reads and Re-Reads.

New Reads

100 Years of Betty by Debra Oswald

I loved this, it was just such a journey with a character that it was easy to identify. It's so illuminating seeing a story unfold through such changes over time - from poverty-stricken war-torn England to modern day Sydney. People see such changes in the course of their lives. I wonder what I will see. 

The Good People by Hannah Kent 

Kent is one of my favourite authors and I have always loved her books, until this one. It's not that I didn't like it but it was easily my least favourite of her books. There just wasn't anything about it that grabbed my attention or connected me to the characters. I do feel very fortunate to have a signed copy though, which I picked up when her saw her speak earlier this year at the Sydney Writers Festival. 

The Quiet Grave by Dervla Tiernan

This is the final book in the Cormac Reilly series by Dervla Tiernan; a fairly standard crime series set in Galway, Ireland. I wasn't too fussed on the first book in the series, but persevered with books 2 & 3 which I increasingly enjoyed. The Quiet Grave fell a little short for me again. Like the first book, the resolution came so suddenly, and was just so unlikely, that it was a little disappointing. 

Re-Reads

I re-read a fair few cosy detective novels this month. Agatha Christie came in with Appointment with Death and Dumb Witness. I also listened to Murder on the Links as an audiobook read by Hugh Fraser.  

I read Australian author Kerry Greenwood's Away with the Fairies, The Castlemaine Murders and Murder in Williamstown. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray also got a look in. I remember really enjoying this book when I first read it but reading it again now my enjoyment was far less. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to be reading men mansplaining their personal views on life and the world but honestly, I found it pretty dreary this time around. 

Review: The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

I love Sulari Gentill’s Rowland Sinclair series. They’re clever and funny and stylish and I hope to be able to read more as they are published (will there be more?). So I was excited to try The Mystery Writer, one of her more contemporary standalone novels. And at first, I was all in. The premise is intriguing. A young Australian woman, Theodosia Benton, moves to the US to chase her dream of being a writer. She becomes friends with a famous novelist, gets caught up in a relationship with him, and before long finds herself at the centre of his murder investigation.

The early chapters are great. It has that contemporary feel with just the right dose of thriller. Theo is a satisfying main character. She is determined, slightly unsure of herself, and pulled into a world she doesn’t fully understand. The setting, the pacing, and the mood all worked for me. It had that very moreish quality where I kept reading just a bit further each night than I meant to.

But then came the ending.

Without giving anything away, I just found it a bit much. The final act took a turn that felt over the top, and it wrapped up far too quickly for my liking. I don’t mind a bit of implausibility in a mystery novel, but this stretched things a little too far. I was hoping for a slow and sensible unravelling, but instead it was all very sudden and, frankly, a little ludicrous.

It reminded me of The Nowhere Child by Christian White, which I also read recently in the way that they both have a strong, promising start that gradually builds tension, only to completely lose me with an ending that didn’t quite fit the tone of the rest of the book. It’s frustrating when you’re enjoying the ride and then feel like the author lost confidence in the story and just sped to the finish line.

That said, I didn’t dislike the book. I enjoyed most of the journey. Gentill is a good writer, and the idea behind the novel, which is probably about exploring ambition and developing creative identity, is interesting. But it didn’t land for me in the way I hoped it would. I would still recommend it, with a warning that the ending might leave you a bit cold.

So not my favourite Gentill (Rowland Sinclair still holds that spot) but I’m glad I gave this one a go and I will still eventually read all of her novels. 

Review: The Scholar and The Good Turn by Dervla Tiernan

I’ve done a complete turnaround on this series.

After reading The Rúin, I wasn’t totally convinced it was for me. I didn’t dislike it, but it felt a bit slow and unsatisfying. But I kept going and I’m so glad I did. With each book, the series gets stronger. By the time I finished The Good Turn, I was completely hooked. This is now a series I genuinely look forward to continuing.

In The Scholar, Cormac Reilly finds himself drawn into a murder investigation after his partner Emma discovers a hit-and-run victim near the university where she works. The case quickly escalates. Layers of privilege, power, and pharmaceutical money complicate everything. It’s more tightly plotted than The Rúin, and I found the pacing better too. There’s still that brooding atmosphere and a focus on Cormac’s professional isolation, but it felt more focused this time. I got a better sense of who Cormac was as a character, someone who was reserved but felt things deeply. 

Then came The Good Turn. This one brings Peter Fisher, Cormac's colleague, to the forefront, and the narrative shifts between Galway and the small coastal town of Roundstone. A young girl is abducted, a key arrest is botched by Peter Fisher, and Cormac makes a career-defining decision to deal with corruption in the police force. The story delves into the police corruption and even outside of that the procedural pressure felt by police and the personal fallout for them. I found myself more invested in Peter than I expected to be, and the change of scenery added something fresh to the series. McTiernan manages to keep the crime procedural format and deepen the emotional stakes.

In short, I recommend this series. The characters become more compelling as we go, and McTiernan seems to grow more confident with each book. So if you’ve read The Rúin and weren’t quite sure, I’d encourage you to keep going. I enjoyed The Scholar a lot, but The Good Turn really sealed the deal for me. I'm reading the fourth book now.