Review of Darry Fraser's The Night on the Darling River, set in late 19th-century Australia

On an evening in late August 1894, a mob of union sheepshearers boarded the paddle-steamer Rodney at its mooring along the Darling River in New South Wales, intent on overtaking the non-union workers heading upriver in defiance of a long-running strike. Darry Fraser deftly incorporates the burning and sinking of the Rodney, a pivotal event in Australian labor history, into a storyline about a host of worn-down characters desperate to improve their lives.

Tess Hawthorn, Alby Slattery, Bram Kempster, and Harry Goodwin grew up as farmers’ children in the river town of Echuca in Victoria, more thrown together by circumstance than friends. Now adults in their early thirties, the four have a convoluted history behind them, and more yet to come.

Tess ends up on the Rodney by accident. Fifteen years married to the abusive Alby, she courageously dons a disguise and flees their home but gets caught up in violence at the wharf and is forced onto the wrong boat. Also aboard are Bram, a reserved man who’s always loved Tess unrequitedly, as well as Alby – each for different reasons. Once Alby discovers Tess there, his anger is swift and irrevocable.

Their interactions move the story forward as their circumstances and environments change, including the rising floodwaters around Echuca. Fraser clearly adores rural Australia and powerfully re-creates it on the page, and her multifaceted characters feel like they belong there. Can Tess overcome her pride and self-protectiveness to accept the help she needs, and will she ever appreciate Bram for himself? After years of rejection and his own losses, does he even still want her? There’s also Harry, Tess’s dashing former crush, always caught up in a new scheme or three.

Into this tangled mix of personalities, Fraser drops in a zippy new character, Miss Eugenia Osborne. Her viewpoint is fabulous. Unlike Tess, “Jeanie” is a confident, wealthy, spoiled woman with a lusty appetite for burly men. Can she really be as superficial as she appears?

While Tess’s journey shows the author’s skill and sensitivity in depicting recovery from domestic abuse, Jeanie’s viewpoint adds unexpected humor. The odds are stacked against women in these depressed times, as evoked so convincingly by Fraser, and she and Tess, equally determined, have different ways of pushing through and surviving.

The Night on the Darling River was published by HQ Fiction (Australia) in December, and it's available for sale in the US on Kindle. Thanks to the publisher for the review copy via Austenprose; this review is part of the blog tour for the book.

Read more about the PS Rodney, whose shipwreck is now a heritage site in New South Wales, at ABC News Australia.

Haunting family secrets across three generations in Ireland and America in Catherine Airey's Confessions

Airey’s intoxicating debut is much more than a saga following young women of Irish heritage across three generations.

Sixteen-year-old Cora Brady, orphaned after her accountant father’s death in 9/11, roams restlessly through Manhattan and her own memories of her artist mother’s suicide years earlier. A letter from an unknown aunt in Burtonport, County Donegal, which Cora recognizes as the setting of a choose-your-own-adventure computer game from her childhood, leads her to her parents’ Irish homeland and an unusual house. Text from the game acts as a framing device, an inspired authorial choice that increasingly deepens in meaning.

Beginning in 1974, in Ireland and New York, sisters Máire and Róisín Dooley come of age, finding romance and enduring displacement and emotional trauma. Much later, Cora’s daughter Lyca seeks out her family’s missing pieces.

Each narrative, conversationally yet eloquently phrased, has a bracing openness that transfixes one’s attention. Women seeking outlets for their tumbling emotions—via writing, art, and more—weave through this polyphonic story, as do the secrets and interpersonal connections that invisibly scaffold their lives. 

This title is also recommended for YA readers, about which I wrote: Mature teens will be drawn into the honest storytelling and eager to discover how all the tales link up.

Confessions will be published by Mariner/HarperCollins next week; Viking Books (UK) is the British publisher. I wrote this draft review for the November 1 issue of Booklist.

There's so much more that can be said, beyond what a 175-word review can offer. The computer game from Cora's childhood is called "Scream School," which is also the novel's original title from when it went out on submission. However, it was changed on the advice of the US publisher, so as not to be misleading (it isn't horror fiction).  The game features two Irish sisters who need to race against time to save the residents of a boarding school before they disappear. The 1970s-era setting comes through vividly in the storyline, which reflects the social attitudes of the time. Curious yet?  Read more about the author's personal and writing background at EchoLive.ie.

Short reviews of four historical novels about uncommon women

Happy New Year!  This is my 1900th blog post, with brief reviews of four recommended historical novels I've read over the past month or so. If you've read any or would like to, please comment.

With my best wishes for good reading for everyone in 2025!

Elena Morandi has unusual ambitions for a young woman in Bologna of 1575: to become a tailor, an occupation forbidden to females, and to expose the powerful, depraved nobleman who had abused her and the other girls living in the Baraccano Orphanage. Elena’s spirited narration sees her through several missteps as she finds an unofficial family of supporters in the growing Renaissance city.

From the hustle and bustle of a master tailor’s workshop to the studio of the yet-to-be-famous Carracci painters, Bologna proves to be as alluring as the better-known Rome and Florence. The cast is realistically diverse, including a Black seamstress who becomes Elena’s friend (she’s depicted in Annibale Carracci’s Portrait of a Woman Holding a Clock). Debut novelist Virgo is herself a talented craftswoman as she works elegant solutions out of complex plotting dilemmas in City of Silk.

Even if you’re a devoted reader of Victorian gothics, you won’t have encountered anything quite like Fayne. A unique masterpiece of the genre, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s novel is a 700-plus page brick of a book that, once past the elaborate opening chapters, was near-impossible for me to put down. Charlotte Bell’s father has always encouraged her scientific inquisitiveness, and when he invites a male tutor to his sprawling, remote estate in the English-Scottish borderlands to continue his motherless twelve-year-old daughter’s education, countless secrets – including the unspoken medical condition that keeps her isolated – begin unraveling.

The less you know at the outset, the more surprises await. Fayne left me pondering established gender roles and admiring the witty language (one dinner party scene is utterly magnificent), but I especially loved the author’s ability to build up layers of mystery and reshape gothic tropes with every reveal. What a shame it wasn't published in the US (although it's available for sale here).

Alice Kyteler, daughter of a prosperous innkeeper and moneylender in Kilkenny in 1279, is an outspoken and haughty young woman who developed a thick skin out of self-preservation against those who covet her beauty and power: “I am sixteen years alone in this skin, and with each season, their hunger for me increases.” Alice has the dubious renown of being the first woman condemned for witchcraft in Ireland, but in Molly Aitken’s fierce portrait, Bright I Burn, this false accusation by a malicious bishop is just one part of her extraordinary story.

Unlike the stereotypical independently-minded female in medieval-set fiction, Alice knows she must marry – “Few would choose a woman banker if she were unwed” – and has a succession of rich husbands. Whispers follow when they die under suspicious circumstances. The novel has been critiqued for its lack of large-scale worldbuilding, but I found the scene-setting well-drawn, with a close focus fitting its subject. While not guilty of the satanic crimes she was tried for, this bold, earthy Alice, with her uncompromising determination to exist on her own terms, is the defiant opposite of innocent.

Lucy Holland’s historical fantasy Song of the Huntress has a complex setup that takes extended verbiage to explain, just like in the novel itself. When she’s offered enough power to vanquish Queen Boudica’s Roman enemies in the 1st century CE, her lover, Herla, foolishly grabs it. Problem is, Herla’s benefactor was Gwyn ap Nudd, lord of the Otherworld, who condemns her to lead the Wild Hunt through the ages, killing with uncontrollable bloodlust whenever the moon is old.

Centuries pass. When Herla reappears in the time of King Ine and Queen Æthelburg of Wessex, she somehow finds the ability to resist her murderous urges – temporarily – and she and Æthelburg, warrior women both, feel a slow-burning mutual attraction. Besides ongoing tensions with other Saxon kingdoms and native Britons, Æthelburg is angered that only Ine takes her abilities seriously, even as he remains romantically distant.

The novel’s premise is a super-creative mashup of eras, and the storyline of dark magic re-emerging in 8th-century England makes an entertaining blend of history and the supernatural. But I found the pace very slow at times, and for a feminist novel, it's curious that Ine’s storyline held my attention the most. Ine loves his wife but isn’t attracted to her, he daringly prefers alliances to fighting, and his coming to terms with a vein of reawakened power is truly compelling.

Publishing details:

Glennis Virgo, City of Silk, Allison & Busby (Nov. 2024)
Ann-Marie MacDonald, Fayne, Vintage Canada (March 2024)
Molly Aitken, Bright I Burn, Knopf (Sept. 2024)
Lucy Holland, Song of the Huntress, Redhook (March 2024)