DNF. Interesting issues but superficially treated. ( )

'Melting Moments' are super-sweet biscuits, which are totally delicious but are cloyingly sweet if you eat too many of them. They are a good metaphor for Anna Goldsworthy's venture into writing fiction.

Ruby Jenkins marries in patriotic haste during WW2, because that's what women did in those days. (Or so this book would have you believe). She has been to charm school, learned the importance of having a feminine presence, and is ready to please a man because that's how things are. (Or so this book would have you believe.) She has a tiresome caricature of a mother-in-law, who conforms to all the stereotypes, because that's how mothers-in-law were. (Or so this book would have you believe.) And eventually, she has a Whitlam-era daughter, who rebels against conservative norms and has A Life of Her Own. (Or so this book would have you believe.) On and off, Ruby questions her missed opportunities, which mostly revolve around men (and not, for instance, on whether she might have taken advantage of the Whitlam reforms to get herself the education that she missed out on, and then take up the late-start career that launched so many of us into independence and self-fulfilment).

Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique aside, we all know women who did not conform to these stereotypes, and Melting Moments would be a much more interesting novel if the characterisation cast a wider net to include them.

(My late MIL, born in 1924, for instance, was at Monash at the same time as The Spouse, and graduated with her Bachelor of Social Work in 1978, thanks to Whitlam who gave women these opportunities by making university free.)

There is a novel waiting to be written about the tectonic shifts in social norms that took place in the sixties and seventies. The relationship between mothers who missed out and daughters who didn't is also well worth exploring in fiction. But the relentlessly domestic Melting Moments is not that book.

To see links to professional reviewers who disagree with me, please visit my blog https://anzlitlovers.com/2020/05/29/melting-moments-by-anna-goldsworthy/ ( )