Restless Dolly Maunder

I should really grep through all my book reviews and get myself a list of authors who I’ve said I’d like to read again. I said I’d look out for more of Kate Grenville’s books when I read The Secret River but somehow that was almost twenty years ago. Anyway I’m finally making good on my promise. My leisure centre has recently been refurbished and now contains a mini (unstaffed) library where they have just a few shelves of books to borrow and a self-checkout machine where you can borrow or return books. Which is great. Hopefully they’ll rotate the selection of books regularly but for the moment I really like having just a small collection to pick from and this is why the Kate Grenville book jumped out at me at long last.

I found this story captivating. It’s a fictional biography starting with Dolly’s birth on a sheep farm in Australia in the 1880s and following her through the various ups and downs of her life as she tries to get away from the expectations that society puts on her. It was a really enjoyable, quick moving read.

About halfway through the book I found myself wondering if the book was entirely fictional and it wasn’t a surprise in the end to find that it was based on the life of the author’s grandmother. I really liked the way she portrayed Dolly and imagined the forces that drove her to make various decisions. The book puts you inside the head of someone who probably wasn’t very likable in real life and makes you love her because you can see why she’s like that and hope that you would be too.

Definitely putting Grenville on my to-read-some-more-of author list now!