Review: Force and Fraud: A Tale of the Bush (1865) by Ellen Davitt

I believe that the first time I heard of Force nd Fraud  being referenced was in the acknowledgements section of a novel by Kerry Greenwood, one of my faviourite Australian authors. When I sought mor einformation about the novel, I found that it is often regarded as Australia's first crime novel, with a female author no less. This was one of those instances where what the book represents was the key driver in me picking this one up to read. 

Force and Fraud is the unravelling of a mystery surrounding the brutal murder of Angus McAlpin, a farm owner in rural Australia whose daughter Flora was forbidden by him to marry her love Herbert Lindsay. Suspicion, and eventually arrest for murder, naturally befall Herbet Lindsay and Flora engages her late father's agent Pierce Silverton to assist in proving Herbert's innocence. As the mystery unfolds, suspicion falls on several characters whose motives gradually emerge, until the truth of who killed McAlpin and why is eventually revealed (no spoilers, but it also wasn't a surprise). 

I enjoyed the idea of Force and Fraud more than I enjoyed reading it.

That feels a little unfair because I so admite Force and Fraud and Ellen Davitt for what she achieved. A woman writing crime fiction in colonial Australia at a time when the genre itself didn't really exist in Australian writing yet. She set the foundation for much of what I now love to read. There is a rich tradition of detective fiction in Austalia now (think Kerry Greenwood, Sulari Gentill) and Ellen Davitt paved the way.

The novel itself, however, was harder work than I expected. I found myself skipping the occasional passage simply because it felt repetitive or slow. I wonder if that's partly because Force and Fraud was originally serialised in Australian Journal: A Weekly Journal of Australian Literature, Science and the Asrts (1865) before it was released as a novel. I've noticed something similar in another serialised works I read recently, North and South. Chapters often end with a dramatic hook to entice readers back for the next instalment which loses its impact when read as a whole work. They also tended to linger a little scenes or rcharacters reflections in a way that made the novel feel a little plodding at times, duiluting the momentum of the novel. 

Nonetheless, I'm glad I read Force and Fraud. It offered me a fascinating glimpse into colonial Australia. It's so fascinating to me to imagine what life was like in times past and think about actual people living their daily reality in the same way that I do, but insuch different circumstances and surroundings. It's not a favourite but as a piece of Australian literary history it was worth the effort.

2/5 A bit of a miss for me, despite appreciating it as a piece of Australian litery history.

Review: Agnes Grey (1847) by Anne Brontë

Agnes is the daughter of a clergyman and a woman who sacrificed wealth and social standing to marry for love. When the family's fortunes decline, Agnes decides to contribute financially by becoming a governess. Partly motivated by necessity and partly by a desire for independence, she enters a world that is in some ways familiar to her, and in others is hostile.

On the surface, Agnes Grey is a coming-of-age story and a romance, but it is also a novel deeply concerned with class, family, morality and the way people treat one another. Anne Brontë pays close attention to everyday cruelties: the treatment of servants, the casual disregard shown to those considered socially inferior, even the cruel treatment of animals. Through Agnes's observations, these small acts become a measure of character.

What fascinated me most was the position Agnes occupies as a governess. She is caught between worlds. She is expected to act as a parent without possessing any parental authority. She is responsible for educating children while being constrained in what she can teach and how she can teach it. She is employed because she is a lady with education and accomplishments, yet she is often treated little better than a servant. Agnes herself reflects on these challenges that she faces in her day-to-day existence. 

For a novel published in 1847, this felt remarkably modern. Agnes's frustrations will be familiar to many women today: being given responsibility without power, being expected to manage the emotional labour of others while having little say in important decisions, and constantly navigating contradictory expectations. She is expected to be firm but agreeable, accomplished but humble, indispensable but invisible. More than once I found myself thinking that while the setting may be Victorian, the experience is not entirely confined to the nineteenth century.

The young women Agnes teaches, Rosalie and Matilda Murray, are equally interesting. Neither is particularly likeable. They are selfish, class-conscious and at times cruel. Yet Anne Brontë allows us to see them as products of their society as much as perpetrators of it. Their futures depend almost entirely on marriage, and they are raised with few meaningful expectations beyond attracting a suitable husband and displaying the right accomplishments. Beneath their vanity and thoughtlessness is a kind of emptiness, created by a society that gives them little purpose and even less freedom.

Unlike Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, Agnes Grey contains no grand gothic drama or significant complexity. Instead, its strength lies in its honesty. It is a straightforward depiction of the daily realities faced by a Victorian governess and of a young woman trying to remain true to herself in a world that constantly asks her to compromise.

I found it utterly absorbing. Its themes felt surprisingly relevant and Agnes is a heroine whose quiet resilience stayed with me long after I finished the final page. It would not surprise me at all if Agnes Grey ends up being one of my favourite books of the year. 

5 / 5 I couldn't put it down. This is a new favourite and books like these are why I love reading. 

Review: All Her Fault (2022) by Andrea Mara

If I had to sum up All Her Fault in a single word, it would be: laborious.

I don't mind a twisty thriller or being led down the wrong path. But this one never really worked for me.

The novel opens with an interesting premise. Marissa arrives at a house to collect her young son, Milo, from a playdate, only to discover that the address she has been given belongs to a complete stranger. There is no playdate, and Milo has been kidnapped. It's the sort of opening that should get you excited but instead, I found myself struggling to engage.

The story is told from two perspectives: Marissa, the mother of the missing child, and Jenny, another school parent whose son was unknowingly used to lure Milo away. I suspect Andrea Mara intended these dual perspectives to build tension and perhaps explore some of the complexities of modern parenting and family life. Sadly, neither of those things really landed for me.

The characters felt disappointingly two-dimensional. We have the cliquey, unpleasant school mums and the career mother weighed down by guilt about balancing work and family. They all felt like familiar television archetypes rather than fully realised people. In fact, much of the novel felt as though it had been written with a television adaptation in mind rather than as a novel in its own right.

Despite being packed with twists and red herrings, the story somehow managed to feel both obvious and overly dramatic at the same time. By the final few reveals, I felt as though I was being asked to perform increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics just to make everything fit together. I appreciate that thrillers often require a degree of suspended disbelief. But this one asked for far too much of it from me.

All Her Fault is interested in blame: who was responsible for Milo's kidnapping, and how responsibility can be shared and imposed upon others. Had the novel leaned more into those themes and been written as more of a literary exploration of guilt and responsibility, I suspect it might have worked better for me. As a thriller, though, it all felt too surface level to have much emotional impact.

It's probably clear by now that I didn't particularly enjoy this one. The premise is undeniably compelling, but the execution simply didn't deliver for me, and unfortunately it's not a novel I would recommend.

1/5: Hard  slog and not for me. 

Revisting Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte

Revisting Wuthering Heights

Like many people, I revisited Wuthering Heights ahead of the release of Emerald Fennell's adaptation earlier this year. Having already reviewed the novel back in 2010, I thought I'd do something a little different this time and instead share some reflections on the film and on returning to Emily Brontë's story after all these years. 

This time around, I listened to the audiobook, narrated by Joanne Froggatt of Downton Abbey fame, and it genuinely transformed the experience for me. 

I have never quite understood people's passion for Wuthering Heights. I loved it, and considered it a brilliant read, but it will never head to my favourite's list. My original reading left me feeling that it was dark, depressing and, at times, hard work. I particularly struggled with Emily Brontë's phonetic rendering of dialect, often finding myself concentrating more on deciphering what was being said than on the story itself. 

Listening to Froggatt's narration removed that barrier entirely. Having a talented actor interpret those voices meant I could simply immerse myself in the story and its characters. So, if you've always found the language of Wuthering Heights a little impenetrable, I highly recommend giving the audiobook a try. 

Is it really a romance?

Despite Wuthering Heights often being spoken about as one of literature's great romances, I have never experienced it that way. To me, it is a story about intergenerational trauma, abuse, obsession and the damage that people inflict upon one another. 

Emerald Fennell, however, approaches the material from a very different angle. 

Her adaptation leans heavily into the romantic and sexual relationship between Catherine and Heathcliff. The film introduces scenes of physical intimacy that are either absent from or only implied in the novel and places much greater emphasis on longing, desire and romantic connection than I ever found in Brontë's text. 

I am not a purist when it comes to adaptations, and I have no objection to a filmmaker reimagining a classic. In fact, I think the scale of Fennell's changes works in the film's favour. The alterations are so significant that it becomes easier to approach this as a new interpretation altogether, rather than constantly measuring it against the original page by page. Smaller changes might have invited endless comparisons, but these changes create something fundamentally different. 

The changes that didn't work me

If I had to take issue with the adaptation, it would be on two points. 

Firstly, I struggled with the reimagining of Heathcliff's relationship with Isabella. In the novel, Isabella's marriage is clearly depicted as abusive and inescapable. In the film, however, there seemed to be an implication that she actively participates in, and perhaps even derives some satisfaction from, the cruelty of the relationship. Whether or not that was the filmmakers' intention, it sat uncomfortably with me. 

Perhaps this is the community lawyer in me speaking, but I am sensitive to the ways abuse, particularly violence against women, is portrayed on screen. I couldn't really see what this change added to the story, and it risked muddying the novel's much clearer depiction of coercion and abuse. 

Secondly, with such a strong focus on the romantic and sexual relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff, I found the film surprisingly slow. There is a great deal of yearning, pining and emotional intensity, but not a lot else happens. I kept waiting for the story to shift gears or build towards something bigger, and then suddenly the ending arrived, feeling more anticlimactic than devastating. 

Final thoughts

Did I enjoy the film? Yes, I did. 

 Was I particularly excited by it? Not really. I didn't object to the reimagining of the plot, nor did I feel protective of the source material in the way that some viewers seem to have been. My issue was simply that the resulting film felt a little too uneventful for my tastes. It's a perfectly watchable adaptation and an interesting reinterpretation of a classic, but it isn't one that I imagine I'll be raving about or rushing to recommend. If nothing else, though, it did encourage me to return to Wuthering Heights itself, and thanks to Joanne Froggatt's audiobook, I appreciated the novel far more the second time around.

Feeling down in the slumps

 

It occured to me today, as today I posted my review of Intperpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri and updated my blog, that I am in a reading slump. 

I would actually go a little further than that and suggest that a light fog of depression has descended upon me like a cloud sinking out of the sky to obscure my way. It's not so thick that I can't see through it, but it's thick enough to get in my way and make everything seem a little bit harder than usual. My last review was in early April and I've read four books in the last two months. 

It's much harder to find joy at the moment. I'm overhwelmed and feel a little in a state of constant low level anxiety about work and my family. Everything really. Finishing my book club book was hard slog and writing the review was even harder. 

In an attempt to pull myself through I have purchased the next book in one of my current favourites, the Maisie Dobbs series by Jacqueline Winspear. I hope that reading something that would ordinarily have me hooked by the second page will help. 

Literary Wives Book Club (June 2026): Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:

• Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
• Naomi of Consumed by Ink
• Rebecca of Bookish Beck
• Kay of What Me Read
• Marianne of Let's Read

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

I have to begin this review by admitting that I am not usually a short story reader. I have always gravitated towards novels, I think I just tend to prefer to spend a bit more time inside one story. It gives me more of an escape from the day-to-day and a place to still my otherwise very busy mind.  That's the good thing about this book club, though - it consistently pushes me outside my usual reading habits. 

Before I get into what Interpreter of Maladies says about wives I thought I would start I would start with some reflections on the collection as a whole. The collection centres largely on Bengali and Indian characters who are often living between cultures, and it explores the relationships between characters who usually share a marriage or a family, but seem unable to truly communicate with one another. Even though some of the stories are quite short Lahiri is still able to portray marriages, family histories, disappointments, migrations, betrayals, and entire emotional lives so acutely and pignantly it's not wonder that the collection won the Pulitzer Prize. 

The story that has stayed with me most is probably A Temporary Matter. Shoba and Shukumar are a married couple whose relationship has been devastated by the stillbirth of their baby. During a series of planned evening blackouts, they begin telling one another secrets in the dark. At first it feels as though the confessions might bring them closer together, but it becomes clear that the grief they have felt has irreparably kept them apart from each other and they are reflecting on what has been at it's end. It is a heartbreaking story, and one that felt particularly relevant to the Literary Wives theme because it asks whether love alone is enough when two people are grieving differently.

Another story that seems directly connected to the idea of wives is Interpreter of Maladies itself. Mrs Das initially appears to be a modern and confident wife travelling through India with her husband and children. Yet as the story unfolds we learn how dissatisfied Mrs Das is with her life. She confesses of her infedility to their tour driver, not so much for advice but jstu to connect with someone. Eventhough she is surrounded by her family on a wonderful holiday, she is desperately lonely. 

Loneliness is something that recurs throughout the collection. In The Blessed House, newlyweds clash over a series of Christian objects discovered in their new home. It's funny but it's also two people who have entered marriage without really knowing or understanding each other. Sanjeev spends much of the story frustrated by his wife and also fascinated by her. Rather than them having come to know each other and embarking on their life with each other in a partnership, they are still getting to know each other, a risky way to start a marriage perhaps. 

Overall, Lahiri rarely presents marriage as a place of certainty or fulfilment.  Her married characters often seem to be negotiating misunderstandings, disappointments, cultural expectations, private regrets. Essentially I think Intepreter of Maladies is trying to portray to the difficulty of truly knowing another person, a common theme in the books we have read for the Literary Wives Book Club. 

So what does Interpreter of Maladies say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

For me, the strongest theme was invisibility. Often the wives appear to be carrying emotional burdens that their husbands either cannot see or do not fully understand. Some are lonely. Some are homesick. Some are disappointed by the reality of their lives. Some are living with secrets. Some are trapped in their grief. Yet very few feel able to express those feelings openly within their marriages. The couples rarely communicate honestly with each other. It's fascinating to see so many people who have committed to sharing their lives with one another, many of whom would have done so from a place of deep love, and yet they are so far apart from each other. 

For someone who does not usually read short story collections, I found this surprisingly rewarding. Not every story resonated equally with me, but by the end, I understood why Lahiri's work is so highly regarded. She had an extraordinary ability to capture entire relationships in just a handful of pages per story. 

Review: The Secret History of Christmas (2023) by Bill Bryson (audiobook)

 I've always loved Bill Bryson's works. I was introduced to his writing with A Short History of Nearly Everything and can still remember how laugh-out-loud funny Notes from a Big Country was. I say this as context for how excited I was when I stumbled across this free audiobook on Audible (a recent subscription I've been enjoying). I knew immediately The Secret History of Christmas would be perfect fodder for my long drives to and from the office, and I wasn't wrong. 

As the title suggests, this audiobook delves into the history of Christmas - from its origins in pagan times, through to its connection to the birth of Jesus and Christian traditions and then the rise of Jolly Old Saint Nicholas, aka Santa Claus, and the secular Christmas that most (here in Australia at least) enjoy today. My favourite chapter traces the history of Christmas foods through time, including the origins of the plum pudding (spoilter alert: it was plumless). And Bryson doesn't just explore the history of Christmas. He also delves into human psychology with a look at gift giving traditions of Christmas, thoughfullly considering gift giving for the giver and the recipient. 

Adding something special to the experience, Bryson himself narrates the audiobook, the benefit of which is that he knows exactly the perfect tone and inflection to make the listening experience a joyful one. He mades the humour, funnier and the wit, wittier. 

This could be a boring book of facts, but in Bryson's talented hands it's a joy to listen to and learn about the history of an annual holiday that brings so many people together. 

3 / 5 Enjoyable, readable and reliable.