Australian author Craig Silvey has plead guilty to possessing child exploitation material. From SBS News;

Silvey, 43, was first charged in January after detectives from WA Police’s Child Abuse Squad raided his Fremantle home, allegedly catching him communicating online with child exploitation offenders and seizing his electronic devices.

He was later hit with extra charges, including allegations he produced child exploitation material between February and June 2022, and possessed further material on 12 January this year.

Those two additional charges have now been discontinued, and Silvey has admitted the remaining counts of possessing and distributing child exploitation material linked to offences in January.

He is next due to appear in the District Court on 3 July for sentencing.

Australian publishing and its children’s sector in particular, have been rocked by this. Silvey was a bestselling author whose books frequently appeared on curriculum, for study (Runt in primary school, Jasper Jones in secondary). His books had been turned into theatre and film, and before his arrest he was supposedly working on a new six-figure book deal.

When this News first broke, I made my views known that I thought it was appropriate to put those books away until the case was done;

Now we have Silvey’s admission of guilt, and I want to address this matter not because I have any particular unique insight, or a lightning-bolt idea to make it all bearable.

No.

I want to shine a light on the case because I’m part of the KidLit community reckoning with this horror, and I don’t want to do that alone.

If this is as far as you can read because it’s all too awful, then I understand and just know; this is not normal, and it’s okay to feel utterly undone and confounded by what’s happened.

I’ve taken solace from fellow authors who’ve written far more eloquently than I ever could on this matter, with practical advice and earnest reflection;

• Craig Silvey has pled guilty to child exploitation. What do we do with his books?

  • Penni Russon’s piece in The Conversation not only addresses the unease I’ve long felt with Silvey’s literature (I’ve only read his Jasper Jones but was underwhelmed, and uncomfortable with his portrayal of violence against Indigenous and female bodies - so much so that I’ve not read anything else of his) - but Russon also gives advice on how to talk to children about his disappearance from bookshelves;

Gentle, age-appropriate honesty will be important in these difficult conversations. For younger children, that might mean something simple and direct: “Craig Silvey looked at pictures and videos of children being hurt, and shared them with others. That is against the law, and it harmed real children.” No young person should be made to feel ashamed for having loved these books.

• I stopped posting my kids online. The Craig Silvey case reminded me why

  • Author Jenna Guillaume being very raw and vulnerable, detailing how she once met Silvey at a festival they were both appearing at, and found him to be “ a good bloke,” - the psychological spin she now feels to have not known (but how could she?) I think Jenna’s feelings of helpless horror have found an outlet in her dedication to not share images of her children online, precisely because you can never know who is a potential danger to them;

One of the most difficult truths to face when it comes to people who prey on children – and what helps the abuse go under the radar far too often – is that they are usually ordinary, affable, and all kinds of other positive personality traits. They are people we know. People we trust. People we don’t think twice about showing cute photos of our kids at the beach, or blowing bubbles, or starting their first day of school.

I also appreciate that both Russon and Guillaume touched on another recent case in Australian KidLit, of a children’s author found to be preying on young people;

• Sydney children’s author Oliver Phommavanh jailed for sending sexually explicit messages to minors

• Children’s book author groomed students he met through schools

I knew Oliver. Like Guillaume, I’d met him at Festivals we’d both appeared at - we followed each other online - heck, I had group selfies with him from those books events. I completely know and relate to that horrific whiplash of realisation; that such predators can hide in plain sight, that perhaps they have even chosen our profession in order to prey upon vulnerable young people. It’s horrifying and disgusting, and between these two cases I am sure Australian KidLit is forever altered, and scarred.

I only take solace in an assumption I have - and I hope it’s correct - that the investigations and subsequent charges against Phommavanh and Silvey means that there is a nation-wide taskforce dedicated to investigating our sector. That it clearly needs to be investigated - as these cases show - is disturbing, but the alternative is unbearable, and so I welcome the surveillance.

I also welcome the nation-wide schools discussion that has kicked off, about how to remove Silvey’s books from curriculum study;

• Australian schools ban Craig Silvey’s books after he pleads guilty to possessing child exploitation material

• Australian author Craig Silvey’s books permanently pulled from WA public schools

I admit; when the News of Silvey’s arrest first broke, I was concerned by some statements that books and publishing organisations put out - but I understand they were being mindful of a possible court case. Now that we definitively know the outcome with an admission of guilt, I think those same organisations need to make clear their support of colleagues (particularly from Silvey’s publishers who must be reeling from this News, and again - may have feelings of guilt, however wrong-headed and misplaced) and also addressing their efforts to similarly remove his titles from shelves, etc.

I especially think support and statements from organisation are needed, because since Silvey’s arrest I have seen disturbing comments online from the general public, making outlandish assumptions. Hurtful comments about male children’s authors, for one - which is unfair and cruel. And speculations about Silvey’s connections to the Trans and Queer communities have been very disturbing; they need challenging and correcting immediately.

This last accusation seems to stem from his 2020 adult novel Honeybee; the publication of which has long disturbed me, since it was Silvey (a cisgender white male) writing from the perspective of a transgender fourteen-year-old. That it was published and even awarded in the year 2020, and with very little pushback from our industry as to its lack of ‘Own Voices’ context (even though that term is entirely imperfect), and again featured a lot of violence against young bodies, has always alarmed me.

In my creative writing class at RMIT; I even touch on the topic of ‘We Need Diverse Books’ and the aforementioned imperfect ‘Own Voices,’ by citing not the reading of Honeybee, but the one (fantastic) push-back review of that novel, from the Sydney Review of Books;

• Not Who But How - Oliver Reeson on Craig Silvey

And yet, the focus of the narrative around this trans girl is their relationship to toxic masculinity. Similar themes arose in Jasper Jones, and this is presumably where Silvey’s own interests lie. A more interesting feat of authorship and invention might have been for Silvey to focus on this character’s relationship to femininity. One has to wonder: what did Silvey’s research open up for him?

Conflations I’ve seen online from the general public, have assumed that because Silvey has written books for children in the past - and because the protagonist in Honeybee is 14-years-old - that this very confronting book was also intended for young readers. They’ve inferred a lot from Honeybee being so violent and sexually-charged - at a time when “culture wars” in America have been increasingly migrating to our shores, and we know for a fact that books for young people with LGBTQIA+ themes have been specifically targeted;

• Most Challenged Books - Every year, the American Library Association compiles a list of the books most frequently targeted by censors based on reports from the field and media coverage.

  • Since 2021, ALA has tracked a sharp spike in censorship attempts in libraries. OIF tracked 4,235 unique titles challenged in 2025, the second highest ever documented by ALA. The highest ever documented was 4,240 in 2023. Of the unique titles challenged in 2025, 1,671 (40%) represent the lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people and people of color.

The general reading public’s confusion about Silvey’s adult and young adult fiction was something that concerned Penni Russon, and she touched on in her Conversation piece as well;

Jasper Jones was published in Australia as adult literary fiction. But in the United States, it was published as young adult fiction, making the American Library Association’s 2012 Best Fiction for Young Adults list. It was then repackaged as young adult in Australia.

While I don’t advocate censorship, I’ve long found the novel’s presence on school text lists troubling: Laura’s sexual abuse and death by suicide exist primarily to catalyse the growth of a young male protagonist. I have always felt the original decision to publish Jasper Jones as adult fiction – which would have driven editorial decisions, including its (bleak) ending – was correct.

I have seen similar conflation and misunderstanding about Honeybee and people making harmful and hurtful connections between its topics and Silvey’s guilt. That he can be a cis author whose book is continuing to harm the vulnerable LGBTQIA+ community through such unaddressed wrong-headedness is alarming, and needs correcting whenever we see it used like a cudgel in comments.

It’s one of the many reasons I do believe that clear statements need to be made; even as to which audience some of his books were intended for because there is clearly confusion amongst the mayhem.

And finally, speaking as a children’s author myself, I - and many in my orbit - have been wondering what we can do to help keep kids safe, and bring some assurances to the school and library communities we operate within.

It’s not perfect, but I have been taking steps to acquire Working With Children (WWC) checks, in all Australian states and territories. I obviously have always had one for my home-state of Victoria where I predominantly operate, giving school-talks and workshops. But I am increasingly looking at book-tours and child-friendly appearances at libraries and bookshops interstate, and I want to be as prepared as I can and make things easier for organisations that I’m working with on such travels.

It’s not easy - some Departments require in-person verification of ID for WWC checks (this isn’t a bad thing in the process by any means, just tricky when you’re interstate). But when I was in New South Wales recently for a Writers Festival, I took time out of my morning and scheduled an 8:30AM appointment with Services NSW to complete my check. Other states allow for interstate and overseas online applicants - I’ve completed my Queensland WWC, and I am in the process of finalising my South Australian one.

Cost is also a little bit of a hindrance - each check is costing me $140, thereabouts. It would be so much easier if there was a nation-wide one-and-done Working with Children check, but therein lies one of the issues that has already been highlighted by other criminal cases. Most recently and disturbingly; the sexual violence uncovered in Australian childcare centres;

• Thousands of reports of abuse have been made in Australian childcare centres. Most alleged perpetrators were allowed to keep working

• Three-year wait for national criminal history checker makes parents ‘sick’

This horrific case has exposed a huge crater in Australia’s childcare safety networks - and Australia is transitioning to a national, continuous-checking system for child-related work to fix loopholes where educators could work across states despite bans. Historically, Working with Children Checks (WWCC) were state-based, but a new national database enables information sharing to prevent “forum shopping” by offenders.

Why this hadn’t been done beforehand is alarming and infuriating, and the blind-spot has caused real, irreparable harm.

And again - there’s been no evidence to suggest that such checks would have uncovered Silvey and Phommavanh’s abuse, either. But I feel better having them done, and so that’s a small mission I can control and let myself work on to try and regain some footing during these uncertain and terrifying times.

I’m also listening and talking to other creators, as we reel from these cases. We’re talking about what we can do to make children safer, set a standard in our communities, and be there for one another as we acknowledge the enormous amount of harm that’s been done.

I take solace from that.

And from the knowledge that we are so passionate and fierce in our dedication to doing everything in our power, to protect children. As author Matt Stanton said, better than I could;

Why, yes I am still obsessed with the Apple+ TV series Pluribus which aired its finale on Dec 24, 2025. It’s one of my favourite new shows, and I am bereft at the thought of it likely not coming back until 2027 or (gulp) 2028.

So to fill the void I decided to create this post, inspired by one key aspect of the show - which is that protagonist Carol Sturka (played by Rhea Seehorn) is a romance author.

Why is she a romance author, you may ask? Show creator Vince Gilligan has a very good answer for that, as explained to the AV Club;

AVC: Is there any narrative reason you chose romance author as Carol’s profession?

VG: I just liked the idea of a writer trying to save the world a lot. I was thinking about different professions, like what if she were a florist or something instead? When you think of someone who saves the world, you’d want a Liam Neeson or a Tom Cruise. You don’t want a writer. That’s about the last person in the world you want tasked with saving humanity because we’re all a bunch of inept idiots. Okay, we’re not all idiots, but if you spend your whole life doing that, it means you don’t want to be in charge of something of this scale. And then I started thinking about what kind of writer Carol should be. I can say from 30-plus years of experience that screenwriters are boring. And romance authors just seem more colorful, fun, and interesting.

I am not the only one obsessed with Carol’s profession;

• Carol’s books in ‘Pluribus’ aren’t real, but I need them to be

And evidently Gilligan and/or the publicity department knew this would be a point of fascination, so they did indeed make the opening chapter and author-letter of Carol’s fictitious Bloodsong of Wycaro available on Apple Books. GENIUS!

• ‘Pluribus’ Book by Rhea Seehorn’s Carol Sturka Available to Download

“Carol” has even done a Reddit Q&A which just makes me froth at the mouth for how much they committed to this bit. It’s got to be up there now, for a best Fake Book in movies and TV;

• The Top 10 Fake Books in Movies

Okay, so who are my other faves?

Thomas Thorne in BBC Ghosts

Yes, I have to be specific now since there are so many versions of Ghosts (including a fab Aussie one!) but I do mean from the original UK 2019 version, portrayed by Mathew Baynton.

Thomas Thorne maybe wasn’t technically an author because he was an unpublished regency-era poet who was never given his flowers (DAMN YOUR EYES!) but he still has spirit (ha!) and an ongoing grudge against Lord Byron, so that makes him a superstar in my book.

Mavis Gary in Young Adult

Played impeccably by Charlize Theron in the Diablo Cody-written movie, Young Adult is about a YA author who returns to her home in small-town Minnesota, looking to rekindle a romance with her ex-boyfriend who is now happily married and has a newborn daughter.

I loved everything about this movie, and re-watch it quite frequently; from the brilliant 80s-era YA cover movie poster, to the fact that when I praised this online after seeing it upon release in 2011 - an actual YA author I know berated me because she said that as a YA-enthusiast reader and emerging writer, I should have been deeply insulted by the portrayal of Mavis as a craven, selfish, bordering-alcoholic and stuck-in-her-imagined-teenagerdom catastrophe of a character.

Nah. It is just straight up razor-sharp fun, and if it felt uncomfortable to any actual-YA authors watching … maybe that said more about them?

Jane Villanueva in Jane the Virgin

Truth time; the stars of Jane the Virgin have found themselves in hot-water recently (Gina Rodriguez for using a racial-slur, Yael Grobglas for being complicit in apartheid, and Justin Baldoni for let’s say, accused harassment - until official ruling). It’s a shame that I’ll likely never be able to watch the show again for of all the aforementioned, because at the time it was a favourite of mine and particularly for latter-seasons that showed protagonist Jane launching her career as a commercial romance author. They even released her fake romance debut, Snow Falling By Jane Gloriana Villanueva! The show did an amazing job of showing the up’s and down’s of being an emerging writer, and then debut author and for that I’ll always have a soft spot.

Peter van Houten in The Fault in Our Stars

If for no other reason than introducing me to the Dutch hip-hop song “Bomfalleralla” by Afasi & Filthy, I love Willem Dafoe’s character from The Fault in Our Stars (adapted from the John Green YA novel). Protagonist Hazel - dying of cancer - opts to go and visit him as part of her ‘make a wish’ because he wrote her favourite novel of all time, An Imperial Affliction.

The character of van Houten is somewhat of an homage to J.D. Salinger and also a small self-insert of novelist John Green, who kinda predicted that Fault would spawn many fan-theories and unanswered questions, just as Hazel has for the ambiguous and sad ending to van Houten’s Affliction. I mean, Green has an entire Q&A section just devoted to the fictional novel!

I love that he’s prickly and has some regrets about how much of himself and his own life (and the death of his daughter) that van Houten put into his novel, and I likewise wonder if Green had similar thoughts - even as he was writing The Fault in Our Stars - over using a real-life fan of his, Esther Earl, as inspo for Hazel. The background to van Houten leads to unpacking a lot of the book itself, and I love that.

Selina Meyer in VEEP

Veep is adapted from one of my favourite British TV shows, The Thick Of It. It is about; Former Senator Selina Meyer finds that being Vice President of the United States is nothing like she hoped and everything that everyone ever warned her about.

When I tell you that every time I re-watch this show from 2012, I am both in hysterics and pits of despair over how accurately it portrayed the shemozzle of US politics … and anything I found to be bordering on too absurd, has since been blown out of the water (like a Venezuelan oil-tanker) by two Trump presidencies.

The brief storyline of Selina hawking her limp memoir is painful, but also painfully accurate.

Nick Miller in New Girl

New Girl is one of my favourite comfort-shows, and one of my favourite characters of all time is hands-down Nick Miller (played by Jake Johnson). Not only does this character give one of the most satisfying and long-anticipated on-screen kisses, but the storyline about his confused, laborious, over-written and befuddling manuscript - The Pepperwood Chronicles - actually becoming a legit literary hit is at once infuriating and, let’s be real, believable. Do I think that a first fiction novel about Detective Julius Pepperwood in New Orleans written by a haphazard white boy could actually become a bestseller? … yeah. Sure. And isn’t that both beautiful and horrifying?!

Look, it’s more of a beloved rage-bait storyline for me and I think the better narrative pathway for this plot was realised in the 2023 TV series Platonic starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne. Sylvie has a husband, Charlie (played by Luke Macfarlane), who has a small mental breakdown (after a disastrous turn on Jeopardy!), quits his law-firm job, and spends his days at home attempting to write a piece of God-awful John Grisham fan-fiction (without realising how much of a rip-off he’s farting out). It’s a brilliant piece of mediocre-white-man-thinks-writing-is-a-cinch comedy with plenty of set-up and pay off. Nick Miller could never.

Jimmy Shive-Overly in You’re the Worst

Gee, I really have a thing for fictional pretentious white-boy authors, huh? Chris Geere’s portrayal of Jimmy Shive-Overly in (brilliant) TV series You’re the Worst is perhaps the most odious and accurate; which is unsurprising when the show is about “Two toxic, self-destructive people who fall in love and attempt a relationship.” He’s a British author living in L.A. who has published only one novel (written during his post-breakup depression) that has sold little and been remaindered at the local bookstore … throughout the series Jimmy is trying to find his writing mojo again, while also spending far too long trying to get said local bookshop to re-stock his novel and attempting to sabotage other author’s appearances there. It’s an exaggerated (I hope) and scathing portrayal of a work-in-progress author

Professor Ji-Yoon Kim, in The Chair - William Henry Devereaux, Jr. in Lucky Hank - Greg Russo in Rooster

Last one, I promise! But it’s a doozy.

I don’t know why, but American television has been churning out comedies about liberal-arts colleges and their English departments, lately.

And, look - yes, some of these spin around cringey boomer/millennial jokes along the lines of “how woke are these they/them snowflake English lit majors?” but I let them have one to get it out of their system and then I’m all in and find all three of these quite charming.

It’s just a shame that The Chair and Lucky Hank got canceled after one season, because they were funny and sharp, poignant and tender. I particularly loved Bob Odenkirk’s portrayal of William Henry Devereaux, Jr. - a professor and department chair of an underfunded college who is battling midlife crisis, academic absurdities, and family drama with his famous literary father (in whose shadow he is forever cast). What really sold me on this character was all the scenes of him suffering through writer’s workshops with his emo students, and the tongue-in-cheek references to literary greats like George Saunders.

But Rooster has also really tickled me, probably because it’s from the creators of Ted Lasso and Shrinking - two of my favourite shows in recent memory - and I’ve gotta say, Steve Carell’s Rooster does feel like it’s part of a trilogy (across various strange workplaces; football, psychiatry and now university). Carell plays a popular pulp-fiction author whose titular character - “Rooster” - gets to live the kind of life he can only dream of, but as his professor daughter’s life is falling apart (Phil Dunster from Lasso plays her philandering fellow academic husband) he agrees to take a writer-in-residence position on-campus to try and shield and help her during this trying time. But he also starts to live a little, in ways he’s only ever dreamed of fictionally before. And - yay! - Rooster has been renewed for Season 2.

Look; I have belly-laughed at all of these shows, but I fear I am a most targeted audience given I teach creative-writing at a Melbourne university. Still, I love all of these fictional burned-out authors trying to claw back some sense of self via teaching. And I love that they’re all somewhat unique portrayals in that they’re showing the next phase for the life of a creative; after getting published, after a modicum success that defines your personality … who are you, when that spotlight moves off and you haven’t been able to write in a long time?

• Life Drawing by Emily Lighezzolo

Now, full-disclosure: Emily has been my publicist at Hachette, so obviously I’m already a huge fan. But I think the fact that she won the Glendower Award for an Emerging Queensland Writer at the 2024 Queensland Literary Awards goes some way to highlighting what a talent she is - and what an incredible debut ‘Life Drawing’ is too.

Here’s the blurb:

Hypothetically, would you want to live forever but invisible, or a short life seen?Hypothetically, would you give up wine forever or sex for ten years?Hypothetically, would you show a friend someone else’s nude?

Maisie and Charlie meet at a life-drawing session as undergraduates: she’s the model, he’s an artist. Their immediate connection carries them across two decades as they navigate the slippery dynamics of friendship, estrangement and family.

Maisie’s story is every woman’s, and Emily Lighezzolo’s bold debut interrogates the collision of art and gaze, desire and consent, muse and meaning. This is a love story. At its core: a woman’s body – seen, touched, loved, hated, commodified and reclaimed. Life Drawing is an award-winning and unflinching novel for our times.

I feel entirely vindicated in my early assumptions that it’d be like a Phoebe Waller-Bridge Queenslander, for fans of Fleabag. A really tender and sensuous story about redrawing your life and finding your edges - it has the exhilaration of unearthing a new generational voice too, and a thoroughly Australian story at that. For fans of Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan - for anyone who feels on the brink of finding themselves …

Watching

• How to Get to Heaven from Belfast

Three lifelong friends reunite after the death of an old classmate turns a wake into a dark mystery. They embark on a thrilling adventure across Ireland, piecing together enigmatic truths amid complicated lives.

A new Irish mystery TV series, from Lisa McGee - the creator of Derry Girls!

Look; like many people, Derry Girls rewired my brain and is a firm Top 10 Favourite TV show of all-time. It was singular and brilliant and a hard act to follow … which is probably why McGee has taken five-years or so, to come out with her follow-up.

Is Heaven from Belfast as good as Derry Girls? … no. But they’re also in very different genres, given this new outing for McGee is a mystery and has a bigger scope than the Derry-locked lives of a small friendship group of 16-year-olds, existing during the Troubles in the early 1990s. But I still found it highly enjoyable and there were some laugh-out-loud moments that had me belly-aching.

I also appreciate that McGee is getting to show off her love for Ireland in this show, the inspiration for which, she told The Guardian, was basically;

“I wanted a shit, female, Northern Irish A-Team!”

But this show with a bigger scope than Derry Girls shot in over-100 locations including some adorable Irish villages north of Belfast, seaside towns near Donegal, and so much more - making for a visually-stunning Irish canvas ;

• Where was ‘How to Get To Heaven From Belfast’ filmed? The Irish locations behind the Netflix murder mystery

I also love that McGee has real allegiance to her actors; and so many from across her various TV series make cameos - or play protagonists - in this new show. I love that she was a writer on the British paranormal TV series Being Human, from 2010-2012 and that’s where she first worked closely with Sinéad Keenan who’d pop up again in McGee’s big TV-show break; London Irish - and who is now a main character on Heaven from Belfast.

It only got six-episodes, but I adore London Irish (it’s on Tubi!);

Take a trip down the local with these highly irreverent drinking buddies in this somewhat amoral comedy of hard-drinking and hard-living.

I am just a Lisa McGee fan, hands-down. I’ve enjoyed everything she’s worked on, and I’m glad she’s back to creating after the resounding success of Derry Girls.

Listening

• Bridgerton Season 4 Soundtrack

Look, it’s no secret that I am a Bridgerton tragic and a Benedict fangirl from the books, utterly thrilled that his Season 4 has been the best of the series so far. The instrumentals on Bridgerton are always top-tier and clever, but this season really stepped it up for me and I’ve added the soundtrack to my ‘classical’ playlist. I particularly love Olivia Rodrigo’s “bad idea, right?” cover. All bangers, literally.

Wearing

• rhode Glazing Milk Ceramide Facial Essence

It pains me having to admit this, but; I bought into the hype (well, I used a Christmas Mecca voucher I had) and purchased a few items from Hailey Bieber’s Rhode range and … they are really good.

I particularly love the blushes (freckle and sleepy girl are my go-to’s, and I literally use them so sparingly on cheeks, eyelids and tiny bit on the nose and call it a day) but the “Glazing Milk Ceramide Facial Essence” will now have to be a staple in my skincare routine, sadly.

I have sensitive skin, but also combination that tends towards dry - so I am always looking for products that my skin can soak up, and I’m afraid the Glazing Milk is it. I do my cleanser, toner and then two drops of the Milk before going in with my face-cream (which is just a basic (NIVEA Soft Moisturiser Cream Face) - and it just makes everything a little more dewy and hydrated till morning. I don’t know how it works, but I’d guess it’s that; “Ceramide Trio (NP, AP, EOP)”?

Anyway. Sorry to report; I am now a fan.

Going

• Farrells Bookshop, Mornington (Victoria)

Keeping this ‘going’ real simple, and sticking to shouting out my favourite close-to-me local bookshop, Farrells! I love them so much (and they’ve been around so long) I even shouted out to them in my debut novel, The Year the Maps Changed.

If you happen to be down on the Peninsula and going to Mornington, you simply must pop in - they’re brilliant, and I’ve found many a fantastic book thanks to their recommendations!

And as a further hot-tip if you’re in town; Wednesdays are market-day and it’s busy but the food is good (pick up a cheesy loaf at Bromley’s Bread and pop into Prego Cafe or go to Barrett Lane Sandwich Bar!). Mornington Library is also very lovely and a nice place to stay cool in summer. And if you want a fabulous dinner; go to Mornington Thai on Barkly Street, or Uthong Thai.

The success of Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín was first published in 1990, with his novel The South. He published five novels thereafter, to great praise and awards buzz - but it wasn’t until his 2009 novel Brooklyn - that he reached global and resounding success;

Young Eilis Lacey dreams of life beyond the confines of her tiny Irish village, but unlike her beautiful sister, Rose, Eilis’ gifts are of a more practical nature: she has a head for numbers, and is a loving and dutiful daughter. Yet her ambition cannot be hidden and soon is noted by the Parish Priest, Father Flood. Via a church contact, he arranges for Eilis to travel to America where a job opportunity has arisen in New York with a reputable ‘merchant of Italian origin’.

Eilis finds lodgings in an eccentric boarding house and ekes out an existence in the cosmopolitan melting pot that is 1950s Brooklyn, impressing her employer, outwitting her landlady, and even falling in love. It seems her dream is truly becoming a reality. But then fate intervenes: a family crisis back home forces Eilis to make a choice between the past and the future, the old world and the new.

Told with a masterful and elegant simplicity, Brooklyn is a sublime Trans-Atlantic coming-of-age story by one of the UK’s greatest living writers.

The book was long-listed for the Booker Prize and won the Costa Novel Award 2009 - it was also an Oprah Book Club pick that helped send it into the stratosphere.

In 2015, the film was adapted by producers Finola Dwyer and Amanda Posey of Wildgaze Films, with bestselling English author Nick Hornby adapting the screenplay. And the movie did extremely well according to Wikipedia;

Brooklyn received many nominations for industry and critics awards, including three nominations at the 88th Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Actress. Saoirse Ronan’s performance was particularly praised, and, in addition to her Oscar nod, she garnered BAFTA, Critics’ Choice, Golden Globe, and SAG nominations for Best Actress.

Brooklyn adaptation

I first read the book, because of the film - which I love so much. And it’s a very faithful adaptation too, except for the ending … Nick Hornby gave the film a much more conventionally happy and romantic ending; of Eilis Lacey choosing her husband Tony in Brooklyn and a beautiful, light-filled closing scene and reunion between the two of them. There’s a voiceover of Eilis speaking to another young Irish immigrant girl on the boat to Ellis Island, her voiceover carries us through the final, light-filled and romantic scene too;

You have to think like an American. You’ll feel so homesick that you’ll want to die, and there’s nothing you can do about it apart from endure it. But you will, and it won’t kill you. And one day the sun will come out - you might not even notice straight away, it’ll be that faint. And then you’ll catch yourself thinking about something or someone who has no connection with the past. Someone who’s only yours. And you’ll realize... that this is where your life is.

Colm Tóibín’s ambiguities

It’s really beautiful, and part of the reason Brooklyn was one of those adaptations, that - for a long time - I’d say I slightly preferred the film to the book, precisely for that lovely finality.

But truth be told; the ending is more Nick Hornby than Colm Tóibín. And recently in revisiting Brooklyn - and its 15-years in the making sequel, Long Island - by listening to the audiobooks, I’ve decided that I prefer Tóibín endings and ambiguities, that I in fact believe they are intrinsic to his themes and messages.

Which is not to say I don’t still love Brooklyn, the movie. And I am a fan of screenwriter (and author), Nick Hornby (Funny Girl is one of my recent faves, of his). He’s had a wonderful career script-writing alongside book-writing, and with a particular talent blending his careers; adapting books to film (An Education based on Lynn Barber’s book, and the year before Brooklyn came out - in 2014 - he wrote the screenplay adaptation of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild).

In 2015 as part of promotion for the film, Hornby was interviewed by The Guardian and partly revealed why he tweaked the ending;

Is adapting from a novel you did not write like picking up a foreign language – do you try to catch the tone of the book?

Brooklyn and Wild spoke to a readership. There is no point alienating that readership just because you have seen something in the book that could make a movie. It is too disappointing for people. Brooklyn is a beautiful, literary novel but we had to amplify it because its feelings and gestures are so understated. Colm Tóibín sees to it that the reader has to make up his or her own mind about what happened.

That’s exactly it … in Colm Tóibín’s Brooklyn we never see Eilis return to America. We get the scene of Miss Kelly telling her she knows of her Italian husband back in Brooklyn, and how she intends to tell Jim Farrell and his mother what she’s done in trapping and manipulating him. The choice is made for Eilis, and while she comes clean to her own mother - and writes a letter of goodbye for Jim - Eilis merely slips out in the middle of the night, into a waiting taxi to begin her long journey back to America. Not because she’s chosen this path for herself with gusto and heart - the way Saoirse Ronan plays it in the film - but because someone else chose for her, Miss Kelly’s scheming forces her hand. It is very much up to the reader if Eilis is happy or compromised in her choice.

It’s an ending indicative and full-circle to Eilis’s entire journey … in which her mother and her older sister Rose, begin the book by already deciding that she is the one to leave their small Irish town of Enniscorthy, and try for a bigger and better life in New York.

To some extent, Eilis doesn’t even really choose Tony - her husband - he picks her out at an Irish dance that he’s infiltrated as a young Italian-American man because he has a thing for Irish girls. For a lot of their courtship Tony just makes himself available and in proximity to Eilis who eventually relents and finds some comfort from her homesickness in the distraction he presents … when Rose dies and Eilis plans to return home, it’s Tony cajoling her into marriage before she leaves to ensure she returns to him.

Even when Eilis is back in Enniscorthy and has the beginnings of a romance with local man Jim Farrell, it’s him assuming that they’re engaged-to-be-engaged as opposed to Eilis throwing herself bodily and wholly into the relationship … he doesn’t consult her, just begins talking so as to make clear he assumes they’re on their way to engagement.

It makes sense for a filmic adaptation that Eilis finally make her own decisions in the finale - and chooses Tony and America. But the book has no such need or desire to appease movie-goers, and Tóibín’s leaving Eilis still unable to choose the path that is already laid out for her, is profound and feels true of the 1950s era.

Audiobooks

I decided to revisit Tóibín’s Eilis Lacey series, precisely because in 2024 he decided to - after 15-years - revisit the world and character that made him a superstar author, by writing his first ever sequel.

But I decided to revisit via audiobook listening;

• In 2024 Saoirse Ronan came back to the character and recorded the new audiobook of Brooklyn

• Also in 2024, Jessie Buckley was announced as the narrator of Long Island audiobook

It’s interesting that Ronan wasn’t tapped to narrate both audiobooks - but I actually think it’s genius casting, to signal that 20-years have past. Ronan is 32 to Buckley’s 36 - but where Ronan’s Irish lilt is light and perfectly suits Eilis at 19 (and is intrinsically tied to the movie adaptation too, of course), Buckley’s voice is deeper and brings that sense of age and wisdom to a woman now in her 40s. There’s a grit and growl to Buckley, that perfectly suits the narrative leap between the two stories also …

Long Island

I know of so many people (myself included) who were totally blindsided by the premise of Long Island;

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighbouring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis, now in her forties with two teenage children, has no-one to rely on in this still-new country.

One day, an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but will leave it with her. Eilis has choices to make, and what she does in the wake of this shattering news is at the heart of one of Tóibín’s most riveting and emotional novels to date.

Yes, the catalyst for the novel - right there in the blurb and opening chapter - is that Tony cheats on Eilis, and gets a married woman pregnant … this woman’s husband comes to the door and tells Eilis that when the baby is born, he will bring it to Tony’s house to deal with.

It’s a big and cataclysmic thunderclap start to the novel, and maybe especially because of Hornby’s romantic ending to Brooklyn, the film - one that shook fans.

But Tóibín was asked about this plot-device, and gives a very brilliant answer in a 2024 interview with America Magazine;

Do you feel any of the characters have changed in significant ways since Brooklyn? If so, which ones?

With Tony, a lot of readers have come up with one way of looking at this. They believe the novel makes clear what a beast Tony is. This is not how I see things. These things happen and they’re not ideal, but it’s not as if Eilis is suddenly living with this monstrous figure. Some readers don’t buy this. Some readers think it’s horrible, it’s disappointing, and how could you do this?

The flippant answer is that God made adultery so we could have novels. This is one of the things the world knows, and if it’s in the world, it’s part of creation. It’s not as though I have decided to bring this into the world.

I don’t think Tony changes. This is one of those things that gives rise to the drama of the novel. Without it, there is no novel. I get quite a lot of emails about this through my website. Readers are so upset.

“God made adultery so we could have novels,” is a perfect answer and if it has indeed elicited such a reaction from readers then it worked as a cataclysm in Eilis’s life - and one that sends her back to Ireland for the first time in two-decades.

It’s also worth noting - again - that had Hornby not tinkered so romantically with the ending of Brooklyn, it’s a development that actually perfectly fits with the arch to Eilis’s life … once again; actions of other people are dictating her future and path, and all she can do is react and move.

The other departure in Long Island is that we get multiple POVs - from Eilis, Jim Farrell, and her old friend (now widowed, and in a secret relationship with Jim) Nancy Sheridan. Again, Buckley’s timbre perfectly suits and swaps between these two women and one man.

I loved Long Island maybe even more than Brooklyn, and specifically for the things that other people hated about the novel.

For one thing; I love that all these people are in their 40s, but messier than ever. Far more than they were in Brooklyn - with their adultery, love-affairs, heartbreaks and reignited passions. I love reading literature that affirms that; the older you get does not necessarily guarantee the getting of wisdom. Just the opposite.

I also loved Long Island because I think it’s Colm Tóibín revealing this deep understanding he has, that your life can begin again at any age. Either because you will it so - choosing to leave your philandering husband - or because it’s deeply unfair, and death makes a widow of you far too soon. I think Tóibín knows this - given that he is a prominent gay author, who has been in a relationship with Hedi El Kholti, a Moroccan-born editor and literary press publisher - and the relationship seems to have started around 2012, when Tóibín was 57-years-old.

I also found Long Island to be a very funny novel - there were times when the Enniscorthy gossips had my toes-curling for their unintentional wrecking of secrets and relationships, and there was an Irish wedding scene in particular that had me in giggles, as I listened - equal parts mortifying and hilarious.

I know the ending is highly controversial - maybe especially for those who cling to Hornby’s decided finality interpretation of Brooklyn. But the ambiguity is actually in keeping with Brooklyn the book, and makes it a true duology book-ended.

I also loved the ending of Long Island that has this feeling of … plates spinning in the air; that as we turn that final page, these characters have a propulsive nature to them - that their lives will continue, there is so much mess and heartache to unpick and while we won’t be privy to it, it continues somewhere off the page.

Yes, it does feel like we’re missing two or ten more chapters. But in that open-end, these characters feel more alive than ever - even as all of them find themselves stuck in that thematic web that Tóibín loves to weave; that none of them are really getting much of a say in their lives. They’re still reacting, and having paths chosen for them.

Do I think there will be a third book in the Eilis Lacey series, concluding it as a trilogy? I don’t know. I hope so! But part of me also hopes it takes years, just as it did between Brooklyn and Long Island. I see Colm Tóibín is now in his 70s and not slowing down; and I’d love him to leap ahead another 20-years and show that’s as true for his characters as it is for him.

And I think of that question that Jim asks Eilis, and never gets an answer to at the end of Long Island;

‘There’s one question I want to ask you,’ he began.

She looked up.

‘Just one?’

‘If the phone rang in your garage on Long Island one morning, or one day, and it was me and I was in New York, or was even closer, and I had come to see you, what would you do?’

Indeed; what would Eilis Lacey do? A fascinating question across two books already, I’d love it if Tóibín made it a hat-trick.

Background

Earlier this year, Janice Hadlow’s 2020 novel set in the Jane Austen multiverse - The Other Bennet Sister, about quietest sister, Mary - was made into a ten-part miniseries, adapted by Sarah Quintrell, and lead-director Jennifer Sheridan. Produced by the BBC, with Sony Pictures Television obtaining global rights and BritBox as co-producer.

The novel got a little lost in the Covid milieu (having released in March 2020) and certainly slipped by me, but the plot was always one to pique the interests of Austen fans;

It is a sad fact of life that if a young woman is unlucky enough to come into the world without expectations, she had better do all she can to ensure she is born beautiful. To be handsome and poor is misfortune enough; but to be both plain and penniless is a hard fate indeed.

In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Mary is the middle of the five Bennet girls and the plainest of them all, so what hope does she have? Prim and pious, with no redeeming features, she is unloved and seemingly unlovable.

The Other Bennet Sister, though, shows another side to Mary. An introvert in a family of extroverts; a constant disappointment to her mother who values beauty above all else; fearful of her father’s sharp tongue; with little in common with her siblings - is it any wonder she turns to books for both company and guidance? And, if she finds her life lonely or lacking, that she determines to try harder at the one thing she can be: right.

One by one, her sisters marry - Jane and Lizzy for love; Lydia for some semblance of respectability - but Mary, it seems, is destined to remain single and live out her life at Longbourn, at least until her father dies and the house is bequeathed to the reviled Mr Collins.

But when that fateful day finally comes, she slowly discovers that perhaps there is hope for her, after all.

And it’s the first cab off the rank in what is going to be a bonanza year for Jane Austen fans;

• Netflix adapting Pride and Prejudice into a mini-series, dropping Fall 2026

• a new Sense and Sensibility film dropping October 2026 (screenplay by Aussie author, Diana Reid!)

Those are the big two and there’s undoubtedly more coming down the pipeline. It’s just sort of funny that last year would have been Jane Austen’s 250th birthday and I think everyone anticipated more content in celebration, but we mostly got non-fiction biopics and stories of the author’s life instead of adaptations of her works;

• Jane Austen: Rise of a Genius

• Miss Austen

So, The Other Bennet Sister was perfectly timed to fill that hole that 2025 left for pop-culture Austen works. And specifically those in the Austen multiverse; not strict adaptations, but retellings and epilogue-stories. These have always been big business in books, but adaptations of them can be hard to come by; the last I can remember watching and loving was the 2013 Death Comes to Pemberley, based on P.D. James’ novel and with some of the most perfect casting (Matthew Rhys as Darcy, Anna Maxwell Martin as Elizabeth, Matthew Goode as Wickham and Jenna Coleman as Lydia?!?! Perfection.)

The Cast

Phenomenal casting on all fronts;

• Ruth Jones as Mrs. Bennet bringing a saucy dash to the character to let us know she was a baddie back in the day

• Maybe Richard E. Grant as Mr Bennet was a tad forgettable but that’s because he dies off so quickly (and because at least one scene I quite liked from the book that somewhat redeemed his character was cut; when he offers apology strawberries to Mary)

• Ella Bruccoleri as Mary Bennet was phenomenal and I am particularly pleased that casting and costume/hair/make-up never gave her a gaudy “glow-up” but just as in the book, her beauty starts to shine through when she begins to smile more. It’s a subtle and powerful performance, and - as has been commented on elsewhere - refreshing to even see armpit hair in a period-drama, finally!

• Tanya Reynolds as Caroline Bingley - who I best know from her roles in Sex Education and The Decameron, bringing such brilliant physical comedic asides to this, coupled with a real biting grace and bitchiness. Pitched perfectly, and because I have a real soft spot for Ms. Bingley that I’ll get into, I am glad the television show softened and redeemed her character slightly.

• Ryan Sampson as Mr. Collins - a hard act to follow from Tom Hollander’s brilliant turn in the 2005 P&P, but Sampson had an arguably harder task because the Mr. Collins in Hadlow’s novel has depth and - dare I say - elicits empathy through a very complex portrayal and some truly heartbreaking scenes. Sampson did magnificently, and really surprised me since I only knew (and loved) him from turns in Plebs and Brassic.

• Lucy Briers as the Bennet’s put-upon housekeeper Mrs Hill was a real stroke of genius casting, because Briers actually played Mary in the 1995 Pride and Prejudice! That she plays a more nurturing, mother-figure to Bruccoleri’s Mary is full-circle tenderness that has delighted fans (P.S. - she’s just done a delightful interview with Sheyi Martins-Allen on her TikTok!)

• Also kudos to the casting team for Indira Varma as Mrs. Gardiner (one half of the Bennet sister’s aunt and uncle, who offer Mary a place to stay in London) she played the Caroline Bingley character - Kiran - in the Bollywood Bride and Prejudice movie from 2004! While she can serve and do catty, she’s so lovely as yet another mother-figure to Mary here.

• Laurie Davidson as Mr. Ryder - one of Mary’s suitors (she technically has three - possibly four, going by the book - overall!) he’s a very Lord Byron-coded character and absolutely delightful. Mary has a real decision on her hands with the various men, and I have to admit … played by Davidson, Mr. Ryder poses a tempting prospect.

• Maybe one of the real stand-out stars to shine in the show is Dónal Finn as another Mary Suitor; Mr. Hayward. Finn has been on a real winning streak lately; the Irish actor had a star turn as Orpheus in the West End Hadestown production (his version of various songs has been the TikTok preferred sound for a while now!). And this year alone - alongside this breakout performance, he plays James Moriarty in the Guy Ritchie series Young Sherlock.

The number of times that the TV show decided to give us classic P&P X100 - magnificent. Why have one wet Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy when you can have TWO?!

Differences between book and film

I listened to the audiobook of The Other Bennet Sister, read beautifully by actor Kristin Atherton and clocking in at 20-hours. The TV adaptation opted for a 10-part miniseries with 30-minute episodes, and a lot of plots and characters were cut or condensed, some action left off the screen.

A fairly major deviation from the book is that actor Varada Sethu’s character of Ann Baxter was a TV-show invention. She is Mr. Hayward’s understood affianced - they met three or so years ago, have an ‘understanding’ that they are engaged-to-be-engaged once Mr. Hayward’s business as a lawyer starts bearing some fruit for his labor. She becomes a good friend to Mary, but it’s a painful and double-edged sword since Mary is also developing great affection for Mr. Tom Hayward - and Ann’s existence thwarts that, in her mind.

I do understand why the TV show invented Ms. Baxter … without her; Mary’s transition to London isn’t as grand, and the main friends she makes are either related to her (the Gardiners; her aunt and uncle and their children) or have romantic inclinations towards her (Ryder and Hayward) - so I think Ann Baxter was a nice deviation and a true girlfriend for her to make, and show for her time in London and growth as a character. She is also a bit of a stand-in for all of Mary’s personal insecurities; a beautiful woman who has the man that she is secretly falling for, and assumed it will all be a repeat of Mr. Collins choosing her sisters and then Ms. Charlotte Lucas over her. It’s important that Ann is as befuddled by Mary’s self-deprecation as her aunt Mrs. Gardiner is, and between these two women she is presented a more caring and nurturing way to be a woman and friend.

Some characters that were cut from the TV adaptation; Lady Catherine de Bourgh! When Mary goes to visit the Collins’ she encounters the formidable Lady and while I would have loved to see who was cast in the role, I can admit that her scenes really weren’t necassary and were more for the truly bookish playing a P&P bingo game more than anything.

In deference to de Bourgh being cut, we do get more classical Pride and Prejudice feels by the TV show inserting more scenes with all the Bennet sisters together as they all congregate at Pemberley, where Mrs. Bennet is supposedly ill and recovering. I really liked this insert, and particularly that the TV show didn’t crowd these episodes with inclusions of Mr. Darcy and Georgiana; instead we get one very funny scene of Mrs. Bennet holding court on a couch with her girls, Darcy approaching the door with a newspaper in hand, looking up to see the chaos and then immediately turning on his heel to leave again. He doesn’t utter a single line in the show.

I think cutting down on Lizzie/Darcy was wise - even though Mary observes their intense connection and love-match in the novel … simultaneously; Mary continues to feel Darcy’s cold-shoulder towards her, especially in contrast to his relaxing character around his wife and sister. Through Mary’s eyes, Darcy is a bit of a tool - and I fear for the amount of people I’ve already heard complain about how “mean” Mrs. Bennet is in the book and show, they couldn’t have handled the thought that Darcy is only tolerable towards women he’s related or attracted to - and Mary being on the outside of those good graces, maybe has a more honest portrayal of his character to offer.

The character who I think the book and show pitched perfectly was - surprisingly! - Mr. Collins. In Hadlow’s version we get to see - uncomfortably and intimately - the truth of his and Charlotte’s poor-match, and the consequences of his actions in not choosing the better-suited Mary as his wife.

Ryan Sampson as Mr. Collins was magnificent, but I’m a little sad that they didn’t fully realise his character-arc from the book, which includes an absolutely heartbreaking monologue where he explains just how self-aware he is, and has always known since boyhood that he is odd and doesn’t fit in. In the book there is a point where he even confides to Mary that he is hopeful of his son; “That he may come to like me, a little.” And I just about WEPT!

Still; I think what cut-down scenes we do get of the two of them are triumphant and get across the most important aspects of Collins’ character the same as Mary’s - we see them in a wholly new light.

Which was better?

GAH! I love/hate this question when it comes to books and their adaptations, but I am going to surprise everyone by saying … I think I slightly preferred the TV show, even though I also loved the book!

I just think the TV show did a fabulous job of condensing but also opening up the story to people who have maybe never read Austen, but know the beats more from adaptations. There’s nothing wrong with that; so the times when the TV show gave us camera-work that focused on small brushes of hands (Matthew Macfadyen hand flex, anybody?) or gave us two regency men in the lake and in dripping wet white shirts? Magnificent. Really clever, and a way to ensure Mary Bennet gets to take her place in the ranks of favourite Austen heroines.

I’ve also got to say; the casting made the TV show utterly swoony and delightful and ensured I’d pop it on my comfort re-watch roster.

I still think the book is also 5/5 - and a masterclass in writing Jane Austen FanFiction in deference to her voice, that shows Hadlow to be a true fan and devotee. There’s a real nuance to Mary’s character in the book in particular, when you realise she’s an unreliable narrator where her own character is concerned, and how self-deprecating she is; made that way by a cruel mother and indifferent society.

Both book and TV show are highly recommended by me, to be sure.

What to read next?

Allow me to wear my literary agent hat briefly, and say; if you loved Tanya Reynolds as Caroline Bingley in the show, and want another book to read in the Jane Austen multiverse; Miss Caroline Bingley, Private Detective. Trust me! Authors Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar have Austen’s infamous Caroline Bingley turning amateur sleuth in this cosy Regency mystery. It’s available in the US, UK, and Australia. And it’s another one where I’d highly-recommend listening to the audiobook, read by Shaheen Khan (the mum from Bend it Like Beckham!)

Background

On the weekend my bestie - Carly - and I went into Village Crown Casino to see You, Me & Tuscany, a new American rom-com directed by Kat Coiro, written by husband-and-wife writing team Ryan Engle & Kristin Engle, and produced by Will Packer (responsible for the 2017 hit, Girls Trip);

When a woman crashes at an empty Italian villa, posing as the owner’s fiancée, she discovers an unexpected romance that could transform her life.

It stars Halle Bailey as protagonist Anna - she is one half of Chloe x Halle, an American R&B duo formed with her older sister, Chloe Bailey. Halle has gone more into the acting side of things nowadays, and her big breakout acting role was in the live-action Little Mermaid of 2023 (though I’ve loved her and her sister since Grown-ish).

She stars opposite British actor Regé-Jean Page, who found huge fame as Simon Basset, Duke of Hastings in the first season of TV show Bridgerton - and has since had a weird relationship with the fans of that show, given that he decided to leave after season one and not return for small cameos in subsequent seasons;

• Much to our dismay, the Duke won’t be in Bridgerton season two: Here’s why Regé-Jean Page isn’t featuring in the next saucy chapter of the series — and this is how Netflix will address his absence.

His absence has - weirdly - been the source of much-speculation, and a large portion of Bridgerton fans take bizarre pleasure in thinking he got “too big for his boots,” and hasn’t quite found matching fame since departing the historical-romance drama. And maybe it’s true that his turn in a Dungeons & Dragons movie didn’t launch the franchise, like he’d probably hoped - and he hasn’t had a ton of roles since Bridgerton - but he is returning to TV as Butch Cassidy in a new ‘Butch & Sundance’ Amazon Series. I mostly think it’s delusional of fans to jump to the conclusion of big-headedness on an actor’s part, instead of some introspection and looking at the ways the fandom can be toxic towards its diverse cast, and more likely; actors don’t want any part of putting themselves in those abusive para-social relationships anymore?!;

• ‘Sorry, we don’t want lesbians’: Bridgerton’s problem with racism, homophobia and body-shaming

Actually, weird relationships to racist fandoms is something that Bailey and Page have in common, given that she also bore the brunt of diverse-casting backlash for The Little Mermaid - something that has happened repeatedly, and Disney in particular continues to never adequately protect their actors from said backlash;

• The Acolyte’s Jodie Turner-Smith Blasts Disney For Failing To Protect Stars From Toxic Abuse

• The racist backlash to The Little Mermaid and Lord of The Rings is exhausting and extremely predictable - Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid are just the latest targets of racist fans.

• Is Disney’s colour-blind casting progressive or exploitative?

• Halle Bailey Says Racist ‘Little Mermaid’ Backlash ‘Taught Me How to Block Out the Noise’ and Zendaya, Arianda Grande Supported Her

A strange but unsurprising connection for the two of them to have;

• The limits of colour conscious casting in ‘Bridgerton’ - Representation on-screen is meaningless if cast members aren’t supported in real life

• Is Colour-Blind Casting In Regency-Era Romances Really Progressive? Or Just Delusional? - For some, the rise in colour-blind casting is a sign of progress and a welcome change. But for me, a world without racism for the sake of romance isn’t fantasy. It’s denial.

And sort of sad that the discussions aren’t abating with their star-turns in You, Me & Tuscany, but are instead taking on yet another bizarre discourse around representation.

For Diverse Films, everywhere?

To be clear; I was keen to see You, Me & Tuscany as soon as I heard about it. Given that I love rom-coms, am a fan of Bailey and Page separately, and would rather poke my eye out than see the new Mario movie for my friend-date excursion.

But what really guaranteed I’d go and see the film was a discussion that began on threads; prompted by Writer, Director, and Actor - Nina Lee;

This has been all but confirmed by Tuscany producer Will Packer;

• Why the Box Office for ‘You, Me & Tuscany’ Matters: ‘Audiences Have the Power to Dictate What Gets Made in Hollywood,’ Says Producer Will Packer

And OUR expanded on how Tuscany is impacting Nina Lee’s movie;

• As detailed by ‘OUR’ on Instagram

• Success Of ‘You, Me & Tuscany’ Could Decide Future Of Black Rom-Coms

• You, Me & Tuscany And The Expectations Placed on Black-led Films

• Why Black Creatives Feel a Lot Is Riding on the Success of Rom-Com ‘You, Me & Tuscany’

A lot of people have noted how unfair it is to put this burden - the future of Black filmmaking and cinema?! - onto the shoulders of audiences and this one movie … especially amidst a cost-of-living crisis (albeit; one made worse by America and Israel’s illegal war) - it’s hardly a time for people to be going to the cinemas in droves, spending money they don’t have;

• ‘Everything is going up’: Americans struggle with affordability despite Trump’s claims - US workers are finding it difficult to afford basic necessities as the president claims ‘the economy is roaring back’

• America’s Cost-of-Living Crisis Is Really a Pay Crisis

And it does seem like a particularly evil cycle of late-stage capitalism;

Especially to put this burden on a film that didn’t have a Black director, or script-writers - and is being given this task because of its producer and lead actors (who, as discussed, have themselves already borne too much brunt in these and adjacent debates).

Not to mention; the future of cinema is in danger, and to suggest it’s make-or-break for Black cinema specifically is leaving out a few key details of the current shrinking film studio landscape;

• Larry Ellison gives personal guarantee for Paramount takeover of Warner Bros Discovery - WBD had urged shareholders to reject $108.4bn hostile takeover bid from Paramount, which is controlled by the Ellisons, following $82.7bn Netflix deal

• Larry Ellison’s son has an aggressive plan to revamp Hollywood - The Skydance founder is preparing a bid for Warner Bros just weeks after closing the Paramount acquisition, catapulting him to the movie industry’s highest echelon.

Not to mention this monopolisation is already leading to really bizarre and bad studio decisions to appease oligarchs as opposed to audiences;

• ‘Rush Hour 4’ in the Works at Paramount at Trump’s Request

It’s particularly galling to see all this emphasis placed on You, Me & Tuscany to save Black cinema - even after Ryan Coogler’s Sinners just had historic wins at the Oscars and Box Office;

• ‘Sinners’ wins four Oscars from a historic 16 nominations

• ‘It doesn’t stick to the rules’: The reason Sinners has become a true box-office sensation

• Hollywood Knows Diverse Films Make More Money. So Why Are Black Filmmakers Still Being Told to Wait? Despite a long list of hits, Black indie filmmakers tell TheWrap they find themselves turning to films like upcoming “You, Me & Tuscany” to prove their work has an audience

So, look - I’m going to tell you what I thought of the Tuscany rom-com but I am also going to say … it’s a damn rom-com and the whole reason I went to see it was to have a good time!

Period.

End of.

And that’s the No. 1 reason you should go see it too;

• You, Me & Tuscany Shouldn’t Have To Save Black Rom-Coms. Let It Be Whimsical, Joyful & Fun In Peace

Review

I really enjoyed the movie! Especially because it has one of my favourite tropes; fake engagement, and felt like an updated take on the 1995 Sandra Bullock rom-com; While You Were Sleeping;

A Subway clerk falls for a comatose man’s brother.

Admittedly; minus the comatose man (instead there’s a chance-encounter with an Italian man in New York, who happens to mention running away from his family and responsibilities in Tuscany, and leaving a beautiful villa sitting empty in his escape). Instead of a subway clerk, there’s Anna - a would-be chef still reeling with grief from the death of her mother, making poor decisions and stalling her life by being a transient house-sitter … who makes further poor decisions by flying to Tuscany on a whim, and through happenstance (dubious) deciding the Italian man’s empty villa will do very nicely for her vacation. There is misunderstandings with the absent man’s family as to her martial status with this stranger, and there’s a cousin-brother (brotha) who poses more of a temptation … like I said; While You Were Sleeping just with more exotic location, and less coma.

The storyline is silly because it’s meant to be! It’s rom-com, trope-led shenanigans that could have also taken a smaller budget, North American-location, and plausibly been billed on the Hallmark channel or straight to streaming somewhere else … whether that entices you or not, is up to the individual;

But it’s fun!

The location really sells it too (shot between Rome and Tuscany) many a panning shot had me and Carly breathlessly ooh’ing and aah’ing over the villa, towns, vistas, vineyards, and mountains on display.

But what absolutely sells this are the leads - Halle Bailey as Anna, Regé-Jean Page as Michael. They are both gorgeous - and they soak up that Italian light until they look otherworldly and ethereal. Bailey is charming in the role, and considering she’s playing a Gen-Z Goldilocks squatter that’s really saying something, that she manages to get audiences onside despite making some ludicrously bad decisions.

Regé-Jean Page had the people in our cinema giggling and you could practically feel their impulse to gleefully kick their feet too. This man was built for rom-coms, and it’s even nicer to see him excelling in this movie role, more than he did in the Bridgerton TV series - where his character came hampered by a lot of personal baggage and brooding. Here he’s cheeky, funny and charming and absolutely has audiences in the palm of his wine-pouring hand.

It did feel like there was another dimension to the story that was edited out; Michael alludes to him and his cousin-brother Matteo having grown up as a trio with Matteo’s ex, Isabella - and Michael hinting that he’s always been second-best in the romantic stakes to Matteo … I wondered if there was meant to be more of a historic love-triangle that Anna has unwittingly stumbled into, but that probably put too much complication into the mix.

Final Thoughts

This film was a little bit cheesy, very beautiful, and highly entertaining. The location definitely elevates it form other rom-coms, and maybe that’s also giving it undue credit, for what would have otherwise been a pretty mediocre movie … but I enjoyed it anyway!

AND if the Tuscan setting does have you pining for more Italian romances, can I just hype one of my spectacular authors that I represent as literary agent, for a sec?

All of Jenna Lo Bianco’s romance novels are Italian heart-stoppers; utterly fun and fabulous! They all have big rom-com trope elements, and if you want a read that is especially spicy, may I recommend the latest release; Love, Al Dente?!

These are all especially brilliant on audiobook;

So much so that many publishers - including my own (Hachette) are publishing this page at the back of children’s and young adult books. This page I took a photo of, for example, appears at the back of my author Karen Comer’s new (fantastic!) YA verse novel, Once Upon Tomorrow;

I think this is amazing, and if nothing else it’s a launching-off point. The beginning of a longer conversation that we should all be having.

Australia Reads

‘Australia Reads’ - a not-for-profit initiative of the Australian books industry to get more people reading more books, more often - is tasked with tracking these trends and programs designed to combat the decline, and has gathered data on Australia’s struggles too;

• What’s driving the decline in young people’s recreational reading? And what can we do about it?

• Understanding Australian Readers

They are not alone, Singapore is also doing world-leading research into the issue;

• The Decline in Volitional Reading: Evidence-Informed Ways Forward

• Reading beyond school years vital for tackling decline in literacy skills: Chan Chun Sing

Other countries are similarly tracking and tackling, because - unsurprisingly - the reasons for the decline in young people’s reading are connected globally. The outliers are those countries experiencing war, genocide, and famine - orchestrated by colonial and imperialist powers, and undoubtedly by design;

• Gaza had educational justice. Now the genocide has wiped that out, too For the first time in many years, education in Gaza is only accessible to the well-to-do.

• Iran calls girls’ school strike an ‘unforgivable war crime,’ demands accountability

And the reasons this is a global crisis are pretty clear;

• ‘A ticking time bomb’: How Australia’s reading slump is making us stupid

“This is a ticking time bomb: if we don’t begin to turn this around now, we’re going to have significant social and economic effects in 10 to 20 years’ time,” warns Anna Burkey, head of Australia Reads, a collaboration of book industry bodies established five years ago to combat reading decline.

Although few Australians are totally illiterate, a staggering 44 per cent of adults (about 7.3 million) have low literacy, where the reading standard ranges from primary school-level up to early high school, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics. People with low literacy may still be able to read menus, street signs and medicine labels, as well as get their driver’s licence, but they may struggle with longer paragraphs in a news story. Others may be able to get through the same news stories but find it difficult to tell you what they’ve just read.

The Reasons

Australia Reads has pinpointed four key factors that are leading to a decline in reading. And despite many News articles forever trying to angle this as a gender issue;

• Australians, especially men, are reading less than ever before

It’s really clear that it’s more of a generational one;

Australia Reads says the four key issues are actually;

Lack of reading role models

As the great Emilie Buchwald - American literary editor and author - once said; “Children are made readers on the laps of their parents.” I certainly aspired to be a reader because my mother, aunt, and grandmother all were - they prioritised reading and did it in their ‘downtime’ for fun and enjoyment. They’d take me to the library and search the stacks just as I did, and when I was a teenager we increasingly began reading the same books and talking about them together. But parents, guardians and adults in general who don’t model positive reading attitudes for children are going to struggle to encourage them to read for pleasure - it’s a real “Put your own life-jacket on first,” situation.

Digital media damaging attention spans

Unsurprising - children have far more demands on their time and attention spans, we all do! Think about the average length of a TikTok video before your attention starts to wane … that’s by design, by the way;

• Social media copies gambling methods ‘to create psychological cravings’ - Methods activate ‘same brain mechanisms as cocaine’ and leads to users experiencing ‘phantom’ notification buzzing, experts warn

• What happens to your brain when you scroll on social media? - Ever wondered why you struggle to put down your device? A neuroscientist has revealed why social media is so addictive – and how it could be reshaping young brains for the worse

Overemphasis on skills rather than enjoyment

This is a really big one, that I often get invited to give school-talks to parents and guardians about - those who are pushing their kids to gain only quantifiable skills when it comes to reading (ability to ace an essay, or answer an English pop-quiz) but go no deeper than that; don’t feed imagination or reading for enjoyment - you’re here purely to extract information from a text to be recalibrated into good grades. It’s crippling for student’s anxiety, wellbeing and entire relationship with reading. But we see this emphasised not just in the home, but by the Government;

• Why hasn’t Albanese ditched Scott Morrison’s jobs scheme? The Job Ready Graduates scheme was introduced in 2021 by the Morrison government to discourage students from entering disciplines that would be less ‘job-ready’. So why are we still stuck with it?

• Labor has promised fast action to cut student debt, but arts students will have to wait for lower fees

Constantly, we see STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects prioritised and the repercussions are far-reaching; not just in what gets elevated in society, but what we’ll lose out on if we don’t invest in the Arts and encourage it as a future prospect;

• Australia in danger of becoming an ‘artless country’ as enrolments in creative courses collapse. Research suggests surging costs under Morrison government’s job-ready graduate scheme and axing of dozens of subjects largely to blame

Limited access to books and texts

You could also say this final point is a likely culmination of the above three, and that is somewhat true. It’s the lack of investment in the core institutions that promote books and reading. In Australia (unlike our UK counterparts, for instance) our public libraries are “thriving” and more vital than ever;

• Australia’s public libraries are thriving as the cost of living rises. We can’t afford to lose them

But the general public still has to remain vigilant against corporatization of these vital, socialist institutions;

• Proposed cuts at State Library of Victoria go against its mission – and will hurt the disadvantaged

In November last year for instance, this story broke;

The State Library of Victoria – recognised this year as the third most popular library in the world – is proposing major cuts to staff and services. The number of reference librarians will be cut from 25 to ten. Children’s and family engagement officers will be axed, as will digital access officers.

The number of free computers available to the public will be “dramatically” reduced, too. Some of our most vulnerable citizens depend on library digital access for basic services. Some staff told the Age they “disagree” with arguments apparently made by senior management that removal of these computers will “address safety issues”.

An interim board wouldn’t release the report that had been conducted and proposed these cuts, but whistleblowers put forward the idea that they were cutting services to prioritise more corporate functions (the closing of the beloved Mr. Tulk cafe when the library opted not to renew their lease, instead giving it to a functions and catering company, seemed to bolster this rumour). Luckily the proposed cuts were met with huge opposition and outrage, enough that the board reversed their decisions;

• Outpouring of support for State Library’s “heart and soul”

• State Library of Victoria scraps restructure plan after outrage from famous writers and public - Proposal to cut jobs and refocus on ‘digital experiences’ attracted ire of writers including Helen Garner and Nick Cave

Public libraries aside, the real threat is to public school libraries - there is a huge segregation of Government investment between public and private schools, and it’s only growing;

• Underfunded public schools, overfunded private ones – the gap grows

• ‘Segregation’ of Australian school system grows as exodus to private schools continues

One of the victims of this disparity is the public school library - understaffed (or with no staff at all, run by parent volunteers), or scrapped entirely. There is an entire organisation dedicated to highlighting this unfolding disaster; Students Need School Libraries.

What Can We Do?

As frightening as it is to think that we are all facing this same crisis, and with the same causes - we can take some heed that it also means we can share wisdom to tackle the problem. And the remedies aren’t all, necessarily, costly … it’s more a matter of patience and dedication to the task with no expectation of quick-fixes and easy-remedies. The path to promoting books and reading will be long and rocky, but we have to stay the course and begin the trek now - or risk losing our way forever.

Be a Reading Role-Model

This one is somewhat self-explanatory, but; you can’t expect kids to read, if you yourself are not reading and setting a positive example. Like I said, I now give a talk - Raising Australian Readers - at schools, to parents and guardians (upon request of English teachers and School-Librarians, generally) promoting recreational reading amongst students. And one of the first questions I ask of the adults in the room is; hands-up how many of you read for pleasure? The number of times that not a single hand goes up, by a very sheepish adult contingent, I’ve lost count. And I again give the example of needing to put on your own life-jacket and adjust your oxygen-mask first before doing the same for your children.

Reading staves off alzheimers and dementia, for a start. And maybe I get some chuckles in the room when I say this applies to the teenagers too, but then I give the very real example;

• Neurologists Report World’s Youngest Alzheimer’s Case

A 19-year-old with no family history of Alzheimer’s has been diagnosed with the condition - and he even started exhibiting symptoms at the age of 17!

But more to the point; adults cannot expect children to do what they are not willing to. And that includes reading. Adults in a child’s life need to set an example - and if that means becoming a recreational reader for the first time, or return to reading for the first time since they themselves were in school - well, so be it.

The good News is; social-media is having some positive outcomes on reading habits of particularly 18-35 year-old women, many of whom have started reading because of communities like BookTok. There are also some promising reports that the same age-category for young men are seeing similar uptick and return to reading, thanks to audiobooks and Spotify branching out into them (young men who took up listening to podcasts in a big way, clearly making the jump to now reading audiobooks, amazing!)

Teachers are also reading role-models

We need to also think beyond the home for who can be a reading role-model for kids. Teachers and the school community should also get involved - in even the tiniest ways, to have the biggest impact.

I attended an ‘Australia Reads’ seminar with VATE (Victorian Association for the Teaching of English) a couple years ago, and when one teacher asked how she could encourage reading amongst her student cohort, a teacher-librarian from an all boy’s school stood up and said they saw the biggest cultural reading-shift in their school community, when they called upon all the teaching staff to start sharing what books they were reading.

Being an all boy’s school, this was especially impactive when the male teaching cohort took part - the library got a big cork-board display at their entrance with teacher’s staff photos and a constantly changing image of the book they were currently reading and recommending. They also encouraged the teachers to bring the books to class and speak briefly about the plot, and why they were enjoying it. HUGE impact and change. So simple.

Meeting author role-models

This is another way that bringing authors and illustrators into the classroom can also have a big impact on kids of all ages. It’s another role-model for young people to see who not only love reading, but are actively working in the books industry in a myriad creative ways.

I was lucky enough to attend Newcastle Writers Festival at the end of March (LOVED it!) and I was on a panel about ‘The Vanishing Reader’ and tackling this very topic of how to get kids reading - alongside the fabulous Professor John Fischetti, and Corey Aden Tutt OAM, an Aboriginal Australian STEM professional, author, social entrepreneur and the founder of DeadlyScience. Corey totally blew me away, being so open about how he did not grow up with a culture of recreational reading, but that he always loved nature and science; he pursued volunteering at Roo Gully Wildlife Sanctuary in Western Australia that set him on his path … and I saw firsthand the way that he’s encouraging young people from all walks of life. Not just to pursue their STEM passions, but he’s writing books for all those kids who know that they are interested in non-fiction more than fiction, he’s providing incredible reading options for kids with varied and kaleidoscopic interests, to encourage them to read.

Embrace different formats

Corey’s incredible plethora of image and illustration-rich texts is also a reminder that there are more ways to be a reader. Audiobooks and graphic novels/comic books are a brilliant way to promote a love of reading, and ones that Australia Reads also recommends to get kids hooked on books. Speaking as someone whose father is visually-impaired, I also want to cut anyone off who’s going to put forward a flawed argument that “audiobooks aren’t real reading,” because that’s incredibly ableist. Also; we all begin by being read to, it’s quite literally the dawn of tales - oral storytelling.

• Audiobooks are a key to unlocking reading

If you need a further pitch on why encouraging kids to read audiobooks is a good idea, Libro.fm (my favourite place to purchase audiobooks, that give a portion of sales to an independent bookshop of your choice!) has this fab list;

• 8 Mental and Physical Benefits of Audiobooks

The two that parents and guardians are always swayed by; audiobooks improve vocabulary (as someone who once said “ew!” when I saw the word “ewe” written down, because I didn’t know my farm-animals well enough to query it) and they promote multitasking and time-management (hey kids!; listen to an audiobook as you fold the laundry, please - the next chapter is ten-minutes long, so that’s perfect timing!)

And your public library allows you to listen to audiobooks for free, check out;

• BorrowBox

• Libby

Likewise, for anyone who thinks graphic novels and comic books “don’t count” - unless you’re visually-impaired, we are all visual-learners and every single day of our lives we are matching images with words. It’s how we move through the world. Graphic novels and comic books elevate this form, often by asking us to look at an image that does not match with its text (think René Magritte, This is Not a Pipe) requiring a far higher skill of literacy and empathy - to see that a comic-book character’s outward projections do not match their thought-bubbles? Huge! Groundbreaking.

I also happen to agree with this quote from the brilliant Marjane Satrapi, creator of the graphic memoir Persepolis, her coming-of-age story in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War,

“Graphic novels are not traditional literature, but that does not mean they are second-rate. Images are a way of writing. When you have the talent to be able to write and to draw, it seems a shame to choose one. I think it’s better to do both.”

—Marjane Satrapi

Resist Devices

Yes, we are living in a Digital World and it’s unfair and unrealistic to expect kids to be raised as digital novices forever. But studies - particularly of smaller countries like Norway, able to implement country-wide trials - are increasingly showing that pushing for digital adoption too early in young people, is really detrimental to their development and education;

• Free iPads ruined kids’ reading in Norway. Now it’s fighting back - The nation’s libraries offer rollerskating, rap workshops — and, most importantly, books to reverse the decline caused by a classroom tech experiment

I would also point out that bookseller Erin Wamala recommended as much when I interviewed her for my Substack, Book Week in the age of AI;

‘They’re given laptops in grade 5 (HUGE mistake) and AI is embedded in EVERYTHING. Word, Canva, Google, everything.’

Time, and Patience.

This is a big one. And it works in a few different ways.

Number one; I came across this amazing school initiative to get kids reading … with dogs! (the dogs read with the kids, to be clear - not dogs who can read … though you never know!)

• Dog-eared page-turners: how Tashi and 388 other canines are helping Australian children to read - They love pats, don’t judge and they let you go at your own pace – perfect for instilling confidence and letting kids associate pleasure with reading

Much like therapy-dogs, story-dogs offer patience and kindness to children - especially those struggling with, and learning to read.

It’s their “non-judgmental nature” that makes canines the perfect companion for children who may feel anxious reading to a group, have additional learning needs, or don’t have opportunities to read regularly at home, says Story Dogs’ co-founder Janine Sigley.

The dogs are accompanied by their owners, who volunteer to help children sound out difficult words and build relationships with the students. Meanwhile, the dog will sit patiently, accept pats and act as a friendly, accepting face.

I love this, and I love that you can donate to the Story-Dogs literacy charity (though I’d love to see a nation-wide roll-out that’s also Government-funded)

Realising that Story-Dogs are doing great work to lower anxiety in children is also essential to understanding some common barriers to reading. For instance; did you know that book-browsing is often a point of huge anxiety for people, that stops them from being able to choose a book to read?

• Why book browsing may be one of the biggest barriers to reading – and what we can do about it

I come from a family of book-browsers; I was taught from a young age that the library and its stacks were open to me, to follow my curiosity. I knew my likes and dislikes, I had the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system taught to me, and I was given free rein.

But many kids don’t have ‘browsing’ taught to them or encouraged - heck, some are never asked “what do you like?” to even know if they’d prefer a science-fiction space odyssey read, or a non-fiction book on astronomy. They can get decision-fatigue and overwhelmed/overloaded with choice. So we have to take the time to break it all down for them … ask questions. Be curious about kids, and encourage curiosity in them. “Hey, do you want to read something set in the real-world, or in a castle?” even something as simple as; “Do you like jump-scares, or would you prefer nothing scary and just to laugh?” They’re learning genre when you ask them stuff like this too, and they’re tapping into the deepest recesses of their personality that’s forming. Maybe that changes from day-to-day, and that’s okay! Ask them these bite-size questions and take them on a trip to the library; let them borrow whatever they want, and maybe the stack of books you bring home, never gets read. That’s okay! It’s giving them options and teaching them choice. To know your own mind takes time, encouragement and patience above all else.

And finally, using time as a reward.

We can all probably remember in school being given “reading time” or just a lesson set-aside to go to the school library and pick some books (gosh, I loved my library bag so much - I stuffed that thing!). Even those of us who remember the Scholastic Book Fair (who didn’t realise the equity issues at the time) at least remember the reverence of your class being chosen next to go and browse … well, this can translate to reward for kids, to encourage them to read too.

TikTok user “Kep Talks” reminded me of this, when he told the story of how his parents used to give him one extra hour past bedtime to stay up late, and read;

Aussie author Adrian Beck also recently broke this down on the Scholastic Australia TikTok page, how you can adjust for little kids … just ten-minutes extra past bedtime. Or time set aside in the day when the whole family takes time to read (that can be everyone reading an audiobook together, even!).

Nothing complicated about it; just fun. And as kids get older you can tack on an extra five-minutes until they eventually get to Kep’s teen-age belief that an illicit one-hour staying up past bedtime reading was a huge boon!

I’ve got to start with one of my favourite actors, whose death in 2008 absolutely gutted me as a 21-year-old; Heath Ledger. The Australian icon whose loss is even more keenly felt in an artistic sense, not just for the depth of his talent but that he clearly sought inspiration from novelisation. And I truly believe that he would have prioritised Australian movie projects as his career progressed, and would have been brilliant in some recent Australian novel adaptations (I could picture him in a small but impactive role in Jennifer Down’s Bodies of Light, for instance.)

• Brokeback Mountain based on the Annie Proulx short story

• 10 Things I Hate About You based on the Shakespeare play, The Taming of the Shrew

• Candy based on the 1997 novel Candy: A Novel of Love and Addiction by Luke Davies.

• The Dark Knight movie, based on the 1986 four-issue comic book miniseries starring Batman, written by Frank Miller.

• A Knight’s Tale 2001 movie, based on the first tale from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

• Ned Kelly 2003 movie, based on Our Sunshine Robert Drewe’s 2001 novel.

Dev Patel

I will always have a soft spot and crush on Dev Patel, harking back to his discovered days on TV show Skins. He has grown into a truly magnificent actor, and his taste in scripts is exquisite and varied;

• 2021 film The Green Knight, based on a 14th-century English epic poem titled Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

• His big-time film role in Slumdog Millionaire, based on the novel Q & A by Vikas Swarup

• The Personal History of David Copperfield based on the classic by Charles Dickens.

• A movie from 2024 I’ve not yet seen, but I am keen; The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More based on four short stories by Roald Dahl.

• And of course, can’t go past the *best* Australian accent by a non-Australian actor, Lion based on the book A Long Way Home by Saroo Brierley.

Sam Claflin

Sam Claflin has had this pointed out to him a time or two, and there are entire articles dissecting his proliferation of adapted books-to-movies and television shows. We thank him for his service and tip our caps to his superior taste (most of the time), and his uncanny ability to appear in comfort movies and franchises is nearly unmatched;

• Love, Rosie movie based on the Love, Rosie (Where Rainbows End) novel by Cecelia Ahern (and a rare case of film being better than the book!)

• Played District 4’s Finnick Odair in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and Mockingjay Part 1 and 2.

• Daisy Jones and the Six adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s juggernaut of a 2022 novel.

• Controversial; Me Before You adaptation of Jojo Moyes’s novel, which I am including but also acknowledging it has been called out for ableism.

• Enola Holmes movie, based on the Nancy Springer children’s series.

• My Cousin Rachel 2017 movie, based on the classic Daphne du Maurier gothic novel.

• The Count of Monte Cristo 2024 mini-series based on Alexandre Dumas’s novel (which clocks in at over 1300-pages, mostly because he was paid by the line by the newspaper in which his works were originally serialized). This is a bit of a dud and dull adaptation, not gonna lie - but it does go to show his bookish range!

Teresa Palmer

You could be forgiven for thinking that a new law had passed in Australia, that stipulates Teresa Palmer must be involved in every major Australian film and TV adaptation of famous books, for how prolifically she seems to have a hand in every pie lately. But I’d argue she’s had a keen nose for good books for a long time now (the one I refuse to include is I Am Number Four because that charlatan James Frey is involved. No.)

• A Discovery of Witches TV series based on Deborah Harkness’ All Souls Trilogy.

• The best zombie romance; Warm Bodies, based on the Isaac Marion YA novel.

• New movie Addition, based on Toni Jordan’s debut of the same name.

• New TV series The Family Next Door, based on Sally Hepworth’s novel.

• The Last Anniversary also a TV series, based on Liane Moriarty’s novel.

Lisa Lu

Very few esteemed actors have the track-record that Lu does, for picking brilliant book-to-movie adaptations (ones that tend to be groundbreaking too!) No wonder she has a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame!

• 1993 classic The Joy Luck Club based on Amy Tan’s classic, had the prestige of being the first major Hollywood film with an all-Asian cast … the next time this happened was;

• Crazy Rich Asians based on Kevin Kwan’s novel/series of the same name.

• 2012 Shanghai-set adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons, based on Pierre Choderlos De Laclos’ classic.

• American Born Chinese, based on the graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang.

Jacob Elordi

Fully admit; this one is a late-entry since I saw Frankenstein. I am sorry Mr. Elordi, for not previously recognising your game! Beyond him being a very tall Australian bloke in Euphoria and The Kissing Booth, I really had not paid much attention to Jacob Elordi … But now I am literally;

I think he’s also been photographed a time or two in bookstores, so he is a reader! Thus I am not surprised by what he’s done so far, and that he’s got a Cormac McCarthy movie in-development too.

• Realising he is a serious (and seriously talented!) actor makes me feel slightly bad that he was just “that The Kissing Booth dude?” for a long time.

• On Swift Horses based on the by Shannon Pufahl book

• Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, based on Priscilla Presley’s memoir

• Deep Water apparently based on a Patricia Highsmith book?

• The Wuthering Heights movie directed by Emerald Fennell. Um. Yeah.

• Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece based on Mary Shelley magnificent Frankenstein

• One that Aussies will especially understand (and he is very good in it, even as I found the show to be quite unrelentingly brutal) Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North TV adaptation.

Saoirse Ronan

Big call, but I’m going to say Saoirse Ronan’s book-to-film adaptation track record is perhaps the most elite. Even the cheesy flicks on here (The Host, yikes) are absolute enjoyable bangers when you’re in the right mood. I want to be in a book club with Ronan because her tastes seem to be impeccable and eclectic, and I can relate.

• Atonement from 2007 which Ronan appeared in when she was 12 turning 13, based on Ian McEwan’s wonderfully bruising novel.

• Little Women based on Louisa May Alcott’s classic.

• How I Live Now based on the YA novel by Meg Rosoff, a very twisty and clever British dystopian grounded in reality and possibility.

• Another Ian McEwan adaptation, On Chesil Beach and while I didn’t love the book, I appreciate the movie.

• One of my favourite comfort-watch movies, Brooklyn based on Colm Tóibín’s novel.

• The Lovely Bones based on Alice Sebold’s novel … I have a real issue with Sebold nowadays (she falsely accused a man of rape, and weaved an entire career around the incident) but this book and movie adaptation are so moving and incredible

• Mary Queen of Scots opposite Margot Robbie, based on My Heart Is My Own: The Life Of Mary Queen Of Scots by John Guy

• The Host which came as an attempt to re-capture some Stephenie Meyer/Twilight magic but didn’t quite get there, even though it’s a good trash watch!

• Mad Mabel by Sally Hepworth on audiobook - Narrated by Hannah Fredericksen, Jenny Seedsman

In 1959, at just fifteen years of age, Mabel Waller became the youngest Australian in history to be convicted of murder.

In 2025, on a quiet Melbourne lane, an elderly man is found dead by his neighbour, 81-year-old Elsie Fitzpatrick. No one suspects any foul play.

Until they discover Elsie’s past.

In the 1950s, her name was not Elsie. It was Mabel.

She is known around the world as Mad Mabel. But is she mad? More importantly, is she guilty?

My wait was finally over to listen to Hepworth’s bestselling Mad Mabel via BorrowBox from my local library, and BOY! was it worth my patience!

I’ve not actually read a Hepworth book before, but so many people recommended this one to me and told me this was signalling a new phase in Hepworth’s career - seemingly even more cinematic, a little experimental mystery novel, and all-round superb … and those people were not wrong. It even has the flair of a Taylor Jenkins-Reid alternate-history mystery to it, for how Hepworth plays around with a fictional notorious Australian criminal case.

The audiobook I must say, was particularly fabulous with two narrators - Hannah Fredericksen and Jenny Seedsman - tackling the back-and-forth timeline with utter aplomb.

Listen to the ravers about this one, it’s well worth a spot on your to-be-read pile!

Watching

• Roomies TikTok series (that you can also watch on Instagram)

A ‘Bilt’ production, this TikTok comedy follows midwestern gal Ellie as she transplants to New York, and moves into a sublet loft apartment since Griffin (whose parent’s own the place) is off to London for a few months to “find” himself. Ellie moves in with Griffin’s roomies Rain and Ovie and hilarity ensues as Ellie navigates being a roommate for the first time, and trying not to let NY chew her up and spit her out.

This is such a gentle and cute series (with some serious filmic appeal!) and Season 2 started in January. It feels like a much gentler/cozy spiritual cousin to Broad City, with a truly wonderful cast and multilayered storytelling.

Listening

• Beyond Israelism Podcast

One of the most impactive documentaries I’ve ever watched, was Israelism directed by Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen, hosted by Simone Zimmerman.

When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. Their stories reveal a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.

In the years and years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Zimmerman and the team behind Israelism have remained active in calling out war crimes, apartheid and zionist complicity … now they’re taking it a step further, and have launched a new podcast produced by Zeteo News (Founded by journalist Mehdi Hasan)

• We’re Launching a New Series on Zionism, Jewish Identity, and Palestinian Freedom. Jewish-American activist Simone Zimmerman and the team behind ‘Israelism’ bring you ‘Beyond Israelism’ – releasing Thursday October 9 exclusively on Zeteo.

It has become vital-listening for me, to feel less alone and stop me spiralling in the mainstream media cesspool, who are so profoundly culpable in their abysmal Gaza genocide coverage.

Wearing

• Radical Yes - Arkestra 2.0 Fisherman Leather Sandal | Citronelle

First of all - Radical Yes is a local Melbourne-based footwear brand that promotes itself thus; ‘Radical Yes is a female-founded brand that celebrates women and creativity. In fact, we created flat shoe liberation especially for women (thank us later).’

They are by far my favourite footwear store, mostly because I have lots of issues with my feet/ankles (I actually had ankle reconstruction surgery in 2022 for torn-ligaments) so I need sturdy-but-still-cute footwear.

To that end; I have *lived* in these fisherman leather sandals all summer and I cannot recommend them highly enough. Comfortable to walk in, and the colour positively POPS!

Going

• Rebel Heart: Love letters and other declarations - free exhibition at State Library of Victoria, running; 12 February 2026 – 27 January 2027

If you’re looking for a fun free 40 or so minutes to kill in Melbourne (or you have to play tour-guide for someone) definitely take them to State Library of Victoria (SLV) anyway, but in particular visit this free exhibition; “a tribute to defiant expressions of the heart, celebrating true stories of the rebels of romance from the past to the present.”

This stirring new exhibition explores romantic love – and its foil, heartbreak – through State Library Victoria’s extraordinary archive of soul-baring letters, intimate diaries and rare manuscripts, amplified in powerful new music commissions by Australian artists Angie McMahon, Mindy Meng Wang, Mo’Ju and Amos Roach. The exhibition also features work by Paul Knight and Drew Pettifer.

Spanning centuries of connection and courage, meet the brave hearts who dared to love unapologetically – from same-sex couples in the Victorian era and a mid-century marriage at odds with the White Australia policy, to love outside marriage, across borders and online.

Discover the love story of bushrangers Captain Moonlight and James Nesbitt, who met in Pentridge Prison; a mourning brooch from 1853 made of the woven hair of Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb; and the legacy of Australian music icons Archie Roach and Ruby Hunter.

It’s really gorgeous and uplifting, and did I mention free?! Definitely worth a visit!

To give you a snapshot;

• They detailed the love-story of a British woman married to an “illegal alien” (Filipino citizen)

• A collection of Victorian-era love letters from every type of person from all walks of life

• Archie Roach’s guitar - gifted to his son, who has permitted its display here (I love this; the layers of love for music, a love between father and son across space and time now too)

• Fan bracelets from Taylor Swift’s Eras tour - donated by fans.

It was an Emily Gale reading update that prompted this idea, back in January.

She had read and loved Amy Witting’s I For Isobel, but noted many on Goodreads had a clear dislike of it. I realised that I was probably in the “hated it,” camp - only because I had studied the novel in high school and distinctly disliked it … Emily Gale agreed, that seemed to be where much of the resentment stemmed from; “Yes, I believe you’re right - and some of the reviews were from the parents of those high-school students, who also hated it.”

It got me thinking about the books (those I can remember) studying in high school. And as I said to Emily at the time, they are; “Always the hardest yardstick upon which to measure literature: how you felt about it as a teenager in a stuffy classroom and with a handwritten essay due.”

I am possibly also thinking about this because one of the books I’ve written - The Year the Maps Changed - frequently appears on curriculum lists as a classroom text, and I’m sure it’s despised by many students who study it (very understandably and for very good reasons, it’s not a perfect book by any means) - but maybe for some, it’s mostly because of the context in which they are compelled to read and study it.

Thus, I wanted to go back and test my feelings about certain texts, and maybe afford some authors a little more grace that I hope I am also given by my young readers, in their future;

• I for Isobel by Amy Witting

Emily Gale correctly pointed out that the titular Isobel in this book would likely be categorised as Autistic by today’s standards; on the spectrum. We didn’t have such discussions about her when I read this book in Year 7, we just found her to be dull and depressing … a book about a young girl who is unloved by her family, and has to make the most of what life has given her - namely; a clever mind and insatiable appetite for stories;

This was life: no sooner had you built yourself your little raft and felt secure than it came to pieces under you and you were swimming again.

A “quiet” novel to be sure, but one I should probably revisit since I have a much better understanding of, and empathy for children now, as an adult, who know from the very first that they are unwanted in this world, and so must navigate a far lonelier road for themselves to some semblance of happiness and calm.

• The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham

Now this one most stands out in my mind, because Ms. Rosalie Ham actually came to our school! I have the most distinct memory of sitting on the floor of our High School library as Year 7’s or 8’s, looking up at Ham as she read a passage and then answered our many questions … and that I raised my hand and got the first question in, which was; “Is there going to be a movie adaptation?” This would have been around 2001/2002 (the adaptation wouldn’t come until 2015!) but I remember her explaining how she’d optioned the rights, but this American company wanted her to change the setting to North America (something of Appalachia, or just rural America-wherever) and she was vehemently against it, and basically said “it’s Australia or bust.” And I was SO HAPPY that she stuck with that instinct, because I also remember how profound it was to realise this novel was “Australian Gothic” - that we could contribute to this genre of Gothicism (I vaguely remember an Edgar Allan Poe story was also studied around this time, but I cannot for the life of me remember which) and how proud I was of that fact.

• Gwen Harwood: Selected Poems

Studying this book in Year 8, is one of the first times when I can remember realising that not everyone liked poetry, and that I’d possibly be in the minority of my English classes for thoroughly enjoying digging into a text … and dig I did;

That’s right; I still have (and cherish!) my classroom copy of this collection, and I have grown to love Gwen Harwood more and more as I get older. And I still remember our teacher telling us how Harwood wasn’t first recognised for her artistic prowess until well into her 40s … that she was often dismissed as a ‘housewife’ moonlighting as a poet, at a time when the Australian literary scene was very hoity-toity, bullish and yearning to be British. Here was Harwood, writing about the mundanity of marriage, the beauty of Australian landscapes, and fantastical forays of fairytales (The Lion’s Bride was a favourite of mine). No wonder I’m citing one of her poems - The Secret Life of Frogs Poem - in the epigraph of my new novel, because the images she evokes in just a few deft lines have always stayed with me.

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Oh gosh, I studied this in Literature and I remember how in love our whole class was with Jay Gatsby. Even more after we saw Robert Redford in the 1974 adaptation.

I remember our teacher really had to hold our hand in the chapter where it’s revealed that Nick Carraway is probably maybe gay (queer, or bisexual) in the scene where he’s standing beside Mr. McKee’s bed and he’s in his underwear. I remember she got us to read and re-read this one line/paragraph and we still weren’t getting it and she eventually had to be all: “Girls—” (I attended an all-girl’s school) “—Girls, do you think he could have possibly slept with this man?” and bless our cotton socks our jaws must have unhinged, and then we immediately glommed onto the next logical realisation; “OMG! Nick loves Jay too!” and we were totally down with him after that, because us readers all adored Mr. Gatsby also.

Fun read. Devastating ending. I still think of random lines/motifs (yes the green light, but also the line; of Daisy, gleaming like silver, safe and proud above the hot struggles of the poor.)

• José Saramago, The Tale of the Unknown Island by José Saramago

Yes, this is one of the first even vaguely ‘diverse’ books I remember studying (early-to-mid-00’s was very bad at diversified reading lists) and it’s not even diverse, it’s just not by an Australian, American or British author, but rather the Portuguese Saramago. This was the cutest little paperback that I still own, and I still love this quote;

“Don’t you know, If you don’t step outside yourself, you’ll never discover who you are”

• Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

I’ve always wondered if every English teacher is trained to let a class read Metamorphosis out loud together - collectively scratch their heads - and then with a flourish present the biographical detail that its author Franz Kafka was in fact (probably, maybe) gay.

To this day I don’t actually know if Kafka was queer, and despite this being up for scholarly debate - I remember my teacher really harping on the point and being so assured in his queerness as metaphor for turning into a giant cockroach …

Yeesh. In hindsight; what an inelegant tightrope to walk in a classroom full of teenagers, many of whom (hand up) probably haven’t fully realised their own sexuality. To then be presented with an (admittedly, beautiful and deeply felt) story of a man turning into a cockroach as some elaborate manifestation (infestation!) of self-loathing and societal rejection … JFC, actually!

Especially because you could also just get teenagers to read this story and ask them if their lives and bodies constantly spinning out of control could sometimes maybe feel like waking up appearing monstrous to your own self, never truly sure if you’re presenting that way to others. I mean; teach everybody about the luteal phase of the menstrual cycle and then ask those with uteruses if they can relate to Gregor Samsa - you’d get every hand.

I think many English teachers also miss a trick in not emphasising the fact that Kafka himself (supposedly) never wanted insects depicted on the cover of Metamorphosis because that would detract from it being a surreal, psychological story into straight-up horror;

• The Story Behind Kafka’s Insect Infestation

• Get That Bug Off the Cover: Paratext and Interpretation

… which isn’t so much ‘don’t judge a book by its cover,’ as it is; ‘don’t let the cover alone direct your interpretation of the text.’

• Conditions of Faith by Alex Miller

This is one I should possibly revisit, because there is a hot priest (in fact I remember one of my friends was so compelled by this, it sent her off to read The Thorn Birds and she would not shut up about how good it was) - but I despised this book with every fibre of my being, and I actually got some of my highest marks in my Literature class precisely because I was so articulate in my hatred.

My main beef was; I knew this was a female character written by a man, because I thought he’d done her such a disservice in making her absolutely insane and contrarian with the most ludicrous and nonsensical life-choices (like boning a hot priest in the crypt of the Chartres Cathedral in France) but as I write this I think it was probably a case of just not being mature enough … now, having lived a life I can totally understand her flipping out about her life choices in marrying a boring Scottish engineer who drags her to France and then Tunisia and just wanting to get her freak on when she can. I should give it another read.

• Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet and King Lear by William Shakespeare

I love Shakespeare, and I always have. The first we studied was Romeo & Juliet in Year 7, and we also watched the Baz Luhrmann movie alongside our reading. I am still floored by how good that movie is (Harold Perrineau as Mercutio and John Leguizamo as Tybalt are still utter perfection to me).

I was very lucky that every English teacher I had delivered the same missive that Shakespeare really only makes sense spoken out loud and performed (and twice I had Drama/English teachers who really wonderfully emphasised this) so I have just always adored the Bard. I even dragged my folks to The Globe when we were in London when I was a young teen, and then to Stratford-upon-Avon too (I got a mug of Shakespearean insults from the gift shop, which I still cherish).

I also love tangential Shakespeare; like David Mitchell’s Upstart Crow comedy series, and my favourite film of all time is 10 Things I Hate About You, modernised adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew.

I own many copies of my favourite Shakespeare plays, but I also kept all my old classroom versions too. I love that they’re almost like time-capsules, and I can revisit my past-self discovering these stories for the first time.

My favourite play is by far Macbeth, and my least favourite was Hamlet at the time of studying in Year 11 (“he just TALKS! Endlessly TALKS!” … and - look - valid criticism of a dude). So I find it particularly funny to know that my new middle grade book coming out this year - Shakespeare in the Orchard - heavily features Hamlet, as a group of interned German prisoners take on the Danish play to combat boredom and inhumanization during World War 1 in Australia. Since writing this book my appreciation for Hamlet (the world’s most famous procrastinator he may be) has grown, probably because I’ve experienced grief and loss a fair amount since I first read him, and have in fact realised; There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

And I specifically had to include these Harcourt editions we had in school, because of a memory I have after a practice-exam in Year 12 when one of our English teachers, delivering general feedback, said; “And one of you seems to be genuinely confused as to who wrote these works - it was William Shakespeare, not Harcourt Shakespeare - that’s the name of the book publisher.” And I promise you; the student who made that mistake really did believe right up to Year 12 that the famous Bard’s actual name was Harcourt Shakespeare (and why not? That was printed on the cover of all our Shakespeare texts, after all!)

• Speaking in Tongues by Andrew Bovell

This I must have surely studied for Drama? It’s the only play I can remember studying, and the first - and it culminated with our class attending a performance at the Arts Centre and I remember vividly that I loved all of it! We read the script, and then watched the (brilliant) 2001 film adaptation and loved that too - I remember my class had very passionate talks about the changes between play and film and how clever they were, but also how the live-theatre just gave us different ‘sensations’?

I have just the fondest memories of this, and it being revelatory for me when it came to theatre. I also recall that my whole class was passionate, and I remember we attended the Arts Centre performance with a whole bunch of other schools from all over Melbourne, and one school in particular had really rude students who kept whisper-chatting during the performance … at the end of the play (and because it was specifically for curriculum) the actors and director came out for a Q&A, and I remember Kira - from my school - shot her arm up straight and pointedly asked the cast; “How does it feel to perform for a rude audience who continue to talk during the play?” and I remember being absolutely chuffed that she’d said something, but that’s just how territorial we must have felt over it - to call out disrespect in retaliation and in defence of this art we’d all come to love.

Isn’t it amazing that sometimes in a classroom, you can just be simpatico and moving as one to this collective admiration of art and it totally colours in your view of a piece forever? I guess I learnt that too, and every time I go to the theatre or the cinema it is reenforced. What was it Stellan Skarsgård said, during his Golden Globes acceptance speech?

“In a cinema, where the lights go down and eventually you share the pulse with other people, that is magic.”

Honourable mentions; the three films I can remember studying in English too.

• The Matrix - I remember we studied this with an English teacher who was also the Drama teacher and he was well into it, and he loved having philosophical talks about all its multi-layers, and the Sydney filming-locations (I mostly remember we spent a long time drawing out all the Alice in Wonderland allusions?)

• Strictly Ballroom - I vaguely remembered watching this movie as a kid, before we studied it in class; but I thoroughly loved it when I re-watched as a teenager. I remember the movie got a lot of mixed-responses in my class, and some students couldn’t figure out if it was meanly over-the-top and doing big caricatures of Australian identity, or if it was just the style (unsure whether to take it seriously, or with a pinch of salt) … but I think by the end we were all onboard and a little smitten with Paul Mercurio’s Scott Hastings.

• Gattaca - Oh, this one most stands out in my memory because I’d never even heard of it before studying, and then I just remember all the deep, philosophical, “what would you do?” conversations we’d have at lunchtime about it. Would you get leg-lengthening surgery? Would you DNA-test potential partners? It was so good, and had us all on the edge of our seats. I still think it’s a great film that really holds up.

Mother Movies

I had the great fortune to watch two films fairly back-to-back that totally unwound and moved me, and they were;

• Hamnet directed by Chloé Zhao, based on the novel by Maggie O’Farrell - After losing their son Hamnet to plague, Agnes and William Shakespeare grapple with grief in 16th-century England. A healer, Agnes must find strength to care for her surviving children while processing her devastating loss.

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You written and directed by Mary Bronstein - While trying to manage her own life and career, a woman on the verge of a breakdown must cope with her daughter’s illness, an absent husband, a missing person, and an unusual relationship with her therapist.

I did thoroughly love both these films - and while I thought Zhao’s direction of Hamnet made it truly spectacular, I was more impressed by the claustrophobic one-woman powerhouse performance of Rose Byrne in If I Had Legs, while also still loving Jessie Buckley’s turn as Shakespeare’s witch wife, Agnes.

And then the Golden Globes came around, and Hamnet’s Jessie Buckley won for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama, while Rose Byrne won in the Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy category for If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. I was chuffed! My two fave performances in 2025 movies, and they both walked away with something (shame it can’t happen at the Oscars, who don’t split along genre-categories).

And then Golden Globes host Nikki Glaser made a very prescient point that pulled me up short …

Huh. I thought.

She’s not wrong.

I began to muse on what these dazzling, star-turn movies commentating on motherhood and women’s complex interior lives was reflecting of the times.

Mother May I

Both Hamnet and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You spin around motherhood - love, loss, and lunacy.

Matt Minton writing for Variety noted this too, in; How ‘Hamnet,’ ‘If I Had Legs I’d Kick You’ and More Films Explore Modern Anxieties Around Parenthood and Raising Kids - and from his opening line it’s clear he’s also trying to fit these films and their commentaries, into the present-day political;

What does it mean to bring a child into today’s world? Based on some of this year’s buzziest films, that question is on the minds of contemporary directors and writers.

From the postpartum loneliness and depression that many mothers face depicted in Lynne Ramsay’s “Die My Love,” the multi-generational fight for meaningful change in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” to the never-ending economic stresses placed on family in Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” many of this year’s films take an unflinching look at the anxiety parents — and, in turn, their children — face in today’s increasingly politically volatile world.

I think it’s a fair question to ask, that moves beyond the tiresome banality of constantly having to explain “art is political” and moves into; “just how political is art?”

Beyond the specific catastrophes of the women in Hamnet and If I Had Legs - plague and depression - there’s a lot that their responses to devastations can speak to in the present day, when it comes to families and child-raising in particular;

• A new guide for parents: managing eco-anxiety in your kids

• Eco-anxiety: what it is, how it affects our children, and how parents can support them - Climate change is changing not only our planet, but also our children’s emotions.

Not to mention the most fundamental ways that women’s bodies and personhood are being attacked and eroded across the globe, and the specific cruelties targeting mothers;

• The State of Women’s Rights - From the United States to the Democratic Republic of Congo, women and girls’ rights have suffered serious setbacks. Despite the challenges, there also have been improvements and victories. Today, for International Women’s Day, Human Rights Watch’s Women’s Rights Division Director Macarena Sáez speaks with Amy Braunschweiger about the best and worst of women’s rights last year, and what Human Rights Watch is focusing on in 2025.

• Gaza war leads to 41% fall in births prompting allegations of reproductive violence - Israel’s war in Gaza has caused high numbers of maternal and neonatal deaths, say two reports

• Iranian women on the frontline of protests

And the fascistic and cruel ways that abuse of women and children is built into systems of oppression;

• ‘Horrific’: report reveals abuse of pregnant women and children at US Ice facilities. Report from senator Jon Ossoff’s office found 510 credible reports of human rights abuses since Trump’s inauguration

• Men Are Impersonating ICE to Attack Immigrant Women. MAGA Emboldened Them.

• Queer and trans immigrants allege forced labor and sexual assault in Ice facility: ‘I was treated worse than an animal’ - At the South Louisiana Ice Processing Center in Basile, detainees say they were forced into hard labor – and sexually assaulted and stalked by an assistant warden

• ‘I was only a child’: Greenlandic women tell of trauma of forced contraception - Women say being fitted with IUDs without their consent left them with pain, shame and lasting reproductive difficulties

• First Nations women have the largest gender pay gap in Australia, new study reveals

• Aboriginal women are scared to seek help for fear their children will be taken, report finds - Human Rights Watch spoke to 33 Aboriginal parents who between them have had 114 children removed and placed in out-of-home care

• One year on from a landmark inquiry, more action is needed on missing and murdered Indigenous women and children

Given all this, it’d be fair enough if people called out why first-person accounts and fictionalised stories of the above aren’t the ones we see on our silver screens - as opposed to tales of a 16th-century English witch and middle-class Montauk mom.

Fair call.

Hear me Roar

In the immediate I’d say - those women mentioned; from Congo to Gaza, Iran and smuggled away inside ICE Detention Facilities or God-knows-where, first have to survive, before they can tell their stories.

And even if they come out the other side, the ability to tell their truth is going to be considerably hampered by an increasingly monopolised and manipulated media landscape;

• Paramount blacklist pro-Palestine voices under new pro-Israel leadership

• Media giants accused of ‘cowering to threats’ as Trump tries to stamp out criticism

• Javier Bardem Responds To Backlash Against Film Workers For Palestine Pledge

• Rush Hour 4 in the works at Paramount after reports of Trump intervening - Brett Ratner, accused of sexual misconduct by several women, will bring his hit franchise back to the big screen

• ‘David Ellison Scares the S— Out of Me’: How Paramount Beat Out Netflix, Won Warner Bros. and Will Change Hollywood Forever

I am reminded of a Noor Hindi poem - Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying - from her collection Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow;

And the Naomi Shihab Nye poem - No Explosions - from her 2019 The Tiny Journalist collection;

A Different Kind of Life

I think that, increasingly, we will have to go seeking out such stories - unable to rely purely on establishments like The Golden Globes or Oscars to deliver us the Mothers we seek. Because these stories do also exist right now. Maybe they’re harder to find, again - because those systems of oppression are at play;

• Acclaimed Gaza Drama ‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Remains Without A U.S. Distributor: Why?

• The Voice of Hind Rajab, film on the murder of 6-year-old girl in Gaza, finally receives distribution in US

• Hind Rajab’s mother hopes Venice film helps end Israel’s Gaza genocide. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, recounts the last hours of the slain girl’s life using the original recordings.

Or because imperfect frameworks make art hard to sit with, but no less necassary and important;

• Cannes-Bound Iranian Film ‘Woman and Child’ Sparks Controversy, Prompting ‘Seed of the Sacred Fig’ Director to Intervene

“For me, there is a clear distinction between the propaganda films of the Islamic Republic and the films that are made under the constraints of censorship,” Mohammad Rasoulof said in a statement issued to Variety after coming under fire from IIFMA for congratulating Roustayee on Instagram about getting “Woman and Child” into Cannes.

“The idea that some individuals may seek to block others from participating in international festivals goes against the principles of artistic freedom — and even against basic human rights,” Rasoulof added.

“Such an atmosphere also places immense pressure on Iranian filmmakers who are unable to work outside the official system or beyond censorship,” he continued.

“They are caught between two forces: on one side, the pressure of the censorship apparatus; and on the other, the pressure from those who label any kind of professional activity as betrayal of the people or complicity with the regime — denying others their right to choose their own path. It is clear to me that people have different abilities, capacities, and even circumstances. Not everyone is able to take the risks involved in making underground films,” Rasoulof went on to note.

• Iran’s other Cannes Palme d’Or nominee should not be ignored - While Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident took home the top prize at the festival, Saeed Roustaee’s latest may have been just as deserving

Seek, and you shall find …

There is a documentary you maybe have not heard of, called Motherhood in the Colony;

• New documentary ‘Motherhood in the Colony’ to profile mothers and their role in cultural resilience

Described as a love letter to mothers and the role they play in the resilience of Indigenous cultures, this month the long anticipated short documentary —Motherhood in the Colony—will premiere on Mother’s Day, Sunday May 11.

Featuring both First Nations and Palestinian women and caregivers, the new documentary reflects their shared histories and experiences.

Through intimate storytelling, the film explores mothering as an act of resistance and unravels stories of colonial trauma, while inviting audiences to listen, learn, and envision a future beyond the oppressive structures of colonisation.

Motherhood in the Colony and its storytellers resist ongoing forces that seek to erase, and invite communities to do the same through an intimate collection of deeply personal stories shared with generosity and care—offered as both testimony and a teaching.

Maybe you’d like to watch the film, or even host a screening - and I will too. The project sounds exactly like what I’m looking for, craving and not always finding in the more mainstream depictions of Motherhood, lately;

Last year one of the biggest debut novels to drop was SenLinYu’s Alchemised, an officially published, “original novel” adaptation of SenLinYu’s viral Harry Potter FanFiction, Manacled.

Yes, it was sold and, - to some extent - advertised as a HP FanFiction “re-skinned” (though I often think “degloved” is more accurate) with all the HP content stripped out to avoid copyright infringement. And I think we can all agree any attempts to distance Alchemised from Manacled and HP were flimsy and disingenuous. I particularly appreciate emmaskies on TikTok digging into all the ways that publishers didn’t even try to hide the incestuousness in their marketing, even while some fans were working overtime to suggest otherwise;

I wrote extensively about this in a Substack;

• Should Stephenie Meyer have sued E.L. James when she had the chance? FanFiction would be very different today, if she had.

And I’m very sorry to say; the sheer success of that endeavour means News out of London Book Fair this week is unsurprising. And when I say success, I mean;

• Big Deal: Legendary Pays 7 Figures for ‘Alchemised,’ Book That Began Life as ‘Harry Potter’ Fan Fiction (Exclusive) The deal for SenLinYu’s novel is believed to be one of biggest in history for a new book’s movie rights, not adjusted for inflation.

Another HP FanFic sells for 7-figures

The London Book Fair (March 10–12) is; “where the global publishing community unites to develop relationships, gain insights, and define the future of creative content,” and the biggest rumblings about of LBF 2026 is another big deal for a popular HP FanFiction, following the Manacled/Alchemised recipe, presumably;

The Archive of Our Own (AO3) story in question is apparently All the Young Dudes - by one MsKingBean89 - about the “Marauders” from HP (a group of four Gryffindor friends at Hogwarts in the 1970s—James Potter, Sirius Black, Remus Lupin, and Peter Pettigrew).

The issues with this deal are numerable.

Rowling is a bad person

At this point, it’s irrefutable that Rowling is using her considerable wealth to make life harder and more dangerous for a vulnerable minority;

• J.K. Rowling uses Harry Potter wealth to fund anti-transgender organization

And at this point, many people once proudly associated with Rowling and the HP franchise (through the books, movie adaptations, and audiobooks) have called her out. Most recently;

• Stephen Fry Finally Calls Out J.K. Rowling’s Rampant Transphobia: ‘Radicalised’

Rowling is a bad person, who still makes a lot of money for herself, and others

At the same time, many people have a stake in keeping these books relevant (there’s a theme-park to keep running, video-games in development) and so a new TV series is in the works;

• Harry Potter TV Series Release Date, First Look, Cast, Music, and Everything You Need to Know

And to whet appetites before the TV show, there’s been a cinematic audiobook update;

• Unveiling the lineup and release dates of groundbreaking audiobook series Harry Potter: The Full-Cast Audio Editions

All of this is in the pursuit of keeping the Wizarding World alive, and making money.

• The Consumerist Dystopia of Harry Potter by verilybitchie

Because - make no mistake - were it not for constant pushes to keep the intellectual property (IP) relevant, HP could well be waning … trust me; as a children’s author I am frequently in classrooms giving book-talks and writing workshops, and I will sometimes ask the question of primary and secondary classrooms; “who here has read or watched Harry Potter?” - and you’d be surprised at how few hands I get.

Think about it; these books are nearly 30-years-old. Kids today were not born when the first novel came out in 1997, or even the first film when it premiered in 2001! Were it not for parents and grandparents reading these books to, or buying them for a majority of kids - most wouldn’t be independently reaching for them on their shelves (how excited were you to read or watch pop-culture your parents swore was; “the coolest when I was your age!”?)

A really interesting New York Times guest essay by British journalist Louise Perry dropped in January this year, really digging into this;

• The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up

It’s been almost 20 years since the final Harry Potter book was released. The wizarding world is still generating interest — book sales remain strong, and the 2023 video game Hogwarts Legacy topped 40 million sales. HBO is working on a TV adaptation of the books, set to be released next year.

But the relevance of the franchise is waning. “We’ve seen our audience age up,” conceded a Warner Bros. executive of the recent spinoff films. When the first of these, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them,” premiered in 2016, just 18 percent of cinema goers were actual children. Most were older than 25, a trend that did not go unnoticed by Zoomers who like to poke fun at my generation for clinging onto our childhood passion. “You’re not a Slytherin, Katherine. You’re 36,” quips the Gen Z comedian Brittany Broski, addressing an imagined “Harry Potter adult” in a TikTok with millions of likes.

You don’t see this with fiction like “The Lord of the Rings” or “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Sales of those books may rise and fall in response to new film or TV adaptations, but those franchises aren’t bound to a particular generation in the way that Harry Potter is bound to the millennials. Perhaps that is partly a consequence of the fact that, as children, millennials experienced the release of both the Harry Potter books and the Warner Bros. films as a series of multimedia events that were skillfully hyped.

“Degloved” HP FanFic rehabilitates Rowling’s reputation

Rowling is normally very protective of, and litigious in the pursuit of protecting, her Harry Potter franchise;

• Legal disputes over the Harry Potter series

Yet, for all this News about other creators, publishers, and studios making bank on original Harry Potter IP and being open about it … Rowling has seemingly given her blessing by not seeking legal recourse publicly (as far as we know - there are rumours that maybe she is getting a monetary kick-back somehow?, in contracts)

It’s not like other big companies and creators haven’t been vigilant against FanFiction hedging into copyright theft in recent times, and making sure they set a strong precedent of protection against such thievery … Netflix famously took necassary measures against Emily Bear and Abigail Barlow who won a 2022 Grammy for ‘Best Musical Theater Album’ of their Unofficial Bridgerton Musical which started life as a TikTok series - though it wasn’t the album itself that tipped Netflix over the edge, but rather their live-performances of it;

• Netflix sues Unofficial Bridgerton musical by TikTokers for copyright infringement

• The Netflix v. ‘Unofficial Bridgerton Musical’ lawsuit, explained

• The Rise & Fall of the Unofficial Bridgerton Musical - Wait in the Wings

Rowling, meanwhile, is seemingly fine with numerous HP FanFictions being stripped of their original IP (even when the authors are vocal about its genesis), going through the Traditional Publishing pipeline, and coming out as bestsellers - sometimes with movie-deals in the wake of success.

The suggestion is; of course Rowling is fine with these FanFic sales that are retooling her Wizarding World, if it means other authors and franchises keep paying homage to her IP, and surreptitiously sending new readers (and consumers) her way.

Even when these FanFic authors make clear that they don’t agree with Rowling’s transphobic politics;

• At Romance Con, the Shadow of J.K. Rowling and Questions of Fan Culpability Loom Overhead

Or - in the case of SenLinYu - are presumably possibly personally victimised by Rowling’s hateful rhetoric;

• Harry Potter fanfic by non-binary writer SenLinYu gets multi-million dollar movie deal

• JK Rowling targets and mocks a nonbinary person who is just trying to live their best life

They don’t do a whole lot of anything to tip the scales or provide recourse to persecuted communities;

More money for more recycled IP and lazy writing

There was a time - before her transphobia was fully known - when an argument could be made that any money generated by the sales of J.K. Rowling’s books at least went back into the publishing pool to acquire more indie and “quiet” books that could have otherwise been overlooked, were it not for the cash-flow Harry Potter generated;

• 20 years of Harry Potter: five local authors assess the cult of the boy wizard

That might have been true in the early to mid-00s, but now it seems a fair chunk of publishing money just goes to acquiring more watered-down stories based on bigger IP to keep franchises afloat via endless official and unofficial reboots. Instead of rewarding originality and taking risks with money generated from successful original content, we’re just seeing the same content repackaged with names changed;

Is this what anyone really wants? Just pre-chewed ideas with all the same story-beats, based on FanFiction that was once free but has now been given sprayed-edges and gold-foil special-edition treatment for triple the price?;

No longer a literary hickey, just straight up cannibalism

I have always loved and defended FanFiction. Quite literally, since I used to write it;

• A defence of FanFiction

I remember when studying a Communications degree at Monash, I read something (and I’m going to paraphrase here, because I’ve never been able to find it again) - that said FanFiction was like a literary love bite - a hickey, if you will! - of a fan sucking on something they love so much, and leaving their mark.

When I teach creative writing at RMIT, I fully support any students who got their start (just as I did) in the “mimicry” of FanFiction writing to find their own voice, and realise their writing pursuits - that this form of “practice” was a wonderful teacher.

And I have always accepted the good and bad of properties that got their start in FanFiction spaces;

• Published Fanfiction is Part of Literary History (For Better or Worse)

But gone are the days of authors working really hard to distance themselves from their FanFic origins, quickly trying to move on from their AO3 beginnings to new and solely original works to prove they don’t need the aid of another author, but can stand on their own talents.

FanFiction was once a pure and wonderful fandom space for experimentation, where people who especially couldn’t find themselves in the mainstream got to pursue fully-realised adventures and happily-ever-after’s …

• How LGBTQ+ people use fanfiction to queer the narratives of their favourite stories - Fanfiction gives queer writers and readers the possibility to reclaim an original story and add, change or completely overturn the narrative.

• Queerness in Fanfiction: Gender, Queer Bodies, and the Omegaverse

And perhaps most importantly; FanFiction was an anti-capitalist space. Not just because purist fans recognised the illegality and disrespect of trying to monetise the works they put out, inspired by their favourite authors - especially those of us who were writing at a time of anti-FanFiction edicts being laid out by those same authors;

• Anne Rice vs Fan Fiction Writers Fiasco - A Fandom Legend by The Geeky Waffle

• Anne Rice’s war on fanfiction: The Spec Writer Massacre by shasha not sasha

… No; we recognised that this was a fan space, separate from the whims and machinations of what would “sell” and be accepted by studio-execs or publishing big-wigs (many of whom were the very reason we were course-correcting “bury your gays” harmful tropes via revisionist FF works).

FanFic was for us, writing thanks and taking a little nibble on the neck of those pop-culture pieces that were shaping and remaking us - for some it was practice, for others catharsis, and for many more it was pure (free, accessible) entertainment and fun.

Now it’s a pipeline.

Another cog in the Machiavellian machine of publishing’s capitalism core - instead of letting emerging writers explore, figure out story, and find their voice, they’re being told to stay mimicking. Don’t grow beyond copying, and keep cranking that same IP so that everything is reproduced, repackaged, and rebooted. Keep the cashflow going in one direction to the select few, no matter how much it hurts fandom spaces and wider communities who once saw those places as lifelines to finally be seen and heard.

This is no longer a literary hickey, it’s straight up lazy cannibalism - and mark my words, it will end up eating everything in its sights … including the very readers and writers who first fed it.

Background

In 1930s Chicago, Frankenstein asks Dr. Euphronius to help create a companion. They give life to a murdered woman as the Bride, sparking romance, police interest, and radical social change.

I really loved Guillermo del Toro’s 2025 Frankenstein movie, and was particularly excited to learn that Mary Shelley fever would continue into 2026 with the News that Maggie Gyllenhaal (actor turned writer and director) would be releasing her own update of James Whale’s 1935 film, Bride of Frankenstein.

The Bride! released on March 6, but even before that it had been receiving less-than-stellar reviews and now nearly a week out, it’s continuing to receive painfully harsh treatment …

• ‘The Bride’ Reviews Are Very Mixed: “A Wokified ‘Joker’-fied Feminist Opera”

though some articles are starting to dig into the ways Gyllenhaal’s movie became strategically doomed by the studio;

• 5 Reasons ‘The Bride!’ Was Dead on Arrival at the Box Office

• Here’s How Bad ‘The Bride!’ Bombed At The Box Office In Its Opening Weekend

• The Bride! Was Never Going To Be A Box Office Smash – It Was Always Going To Be Your New Favorite Movie

That last article hits on something elemental, I think - about where The Bride! may be positioned in people’s hearts and minds in the future;

As our own Ryan Scott has identified, there are multiple reasons why “The Bride!” disappointed financially, but with all due respect to my colleague (who is infinitely more passionate and knowledgeable about box office totals than I will ever care to be), “The Bride!” also flopped because misogyny is alive and well. As we’ve seen time and again with films like “Heathers,” “Jawbreaker,” “Josie and the Pussycats,” “Jennifer’s Body,” and “Lisa Frankenstein,” movies about ungovernable women that embrace being The Most are never rewarded at the box office yet have the power to completely change the brain chemistry of those who resonate with them.

I think that’s true, and since B. J. Colangelo name-checked 5/5 of my favourite movies when praising The Bride!’s offbeat appeal, I decided to put my bum in a seat and show up for this OTT feminist take on Bride of Frankenstein (and yes, I did a random Gold Class 2.30PM screening on a Wednesday because the world is otherwise burning and we’ve gotta take these moments of whimsy when we’re hit by them);

The Story

So … it’s very confused.

We begin with a title-card praising Mary Shelley for having written Frankenstein (The Modern Prometheus) on ‘a dare’ - queue actor Jessie Buckley in Shelley cosplay, black and white in some sort of limbo afterlife speaking directly to the audience about a story she’s just dying to tell, finally! (this feels like a scene from Aussie horror movie Talk to Me or - I thought - it could have been a bizarre seance) … we’re then thrown into the life of Ida (or, not Ida - but called Ida by Shelley’s ghost?) in a swanky Chicago club when she is seemingly possessed by the dead writer’s spirit, speaking alternately in her broad American accent and Shelley’s biting British cadence.

Weird, but - okay.

“Ida” is quickly killed by her - maybe? - boyfriend, after calling out a mob boss (presumably?) but the point is she’s possessed and then murdered (accidentally?)

Cut to; Christian Bale as “Frank” (Frankenstein) who will at various points sound Cockney, then claim to be Flemish and then try to match his bride with a broad American accent … anyway; he’s visiting renowned Dr. Euphronius (Annette Bening) - known for her revivalist science, as he begs her for a mate of the conjugal persuasion … having established Mary Shelley’s fourth-wall breaking, we know that Frankenstein was a real publication in this world but Euphronius also takes Dr. Frankenstein as a real colleague and “Frank” as his real scientific success. Again, confusing. Needlessly so? I’m still not sure where we landed and how meta the film intended to go …

Anyway. Frank and Euphronius somehow find Ida’s body in a pauper’s grave (but, wait - she was murdered …? her body presumably hastily disposed of - how did Frank and the doctor know to dig …? Y’know what? Never mind. These questions are never answered.)

Frank gets his ‘bride’/wife - they go out for a night on the town but are accosted and hassled and Frank turns murderous and then they’re on the run to signal a Bonnie and Clyde second-half.

Somewhere along the way the film decides that they’re not just mindless criminals, but principled - as Ida waves a gun around at a swanky party where she just happens to know some of the deepest, darkest secrets of the filthy rich and corrupt in attendance (at the place they just happened to stumble into? How …? - again, let it go, these holes are never patched over. I assume Shelley’s seance-universe had whispers of the dead in Ida’s head?)

Oh yeah, there’s a detective tracking them down now - Jake Wiles played by Gyllenhaal’s real-life partner, Peter Sarsgaard, and his Spanish “secretary” (really a more competent lady detective who has to pretend otherwise because it’s the 1930s and - misogyny - but weirdly, not bigotry? Which I think would have also been an issue and if you’re going to follow-through with the patriarchy why not also …? I know, I know -dropping it.) Myrna Malloy, played by Penélope Cruz .

Suddenly Ida becomes a feminist icon, and at some point women are in the streets with drawn-on black markings (really from Dr. Euphronius’s reinvigorating liquid) quoting her big speech to the bad-guy big-wigs and then it’s decided she’s actually on the run from some guy called Lupino, who she bad-mouthed while possessed by Shelley’s spirit and who has been killing call-girls and taking their tongues …?

Jake Gyllenhaal is also in there, playing a Fred Astaire type actor called Ronnie Reed, whom Frank is obsessed with and has occasional dream-sequences with (which mostly feels like a way to head-nod to the genius of Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein, more than anything)

The Problem with the Story

Confused is an understatement. It’s convoluted and unnecessarily complicated - particularly by the self-insertion of Mary Shelley (she’s always there, Ida almost has Tourette Syndrome for the moments when Shelley’s voice breaks through) but the main issue is … there’s no real villain.

At various points you’re left to wonder if Frank is the villain (ordering a bride, how grotesque - right?) then Gyllenhaal decides to swing WAAAAAY too big and go with “Society is the villain!” (eh, I feel like maybe this could have got away with class warfare, but we see regular-joe people being the worst - with pitchforks! crooked cops! - so it’s not just the upper-crust, uber-wealthy) then way too late in the final third she seems to settle on this Lupino guy as the real villain of the whole thing - but he has a proxy, John Magaro as ‘Clyde’ running around doing his bidding and trying to kill Ida for “reasons” (and how does he know where Ida and Frank are gonna be anyway?, he just shows up … Let it go. Breathe. Never answered.) so he also feels like an under-cooked villain.

Oh; shout-out to the one last-ditch effort at the end to give the plot a purpose, when Ida screams “Me too! Me too!” in a subtle-as-a-sledgehammer which comes no-consequences-for-those-appearing-in-the-Epstein-files too late to be of much relevance as feminist motivation in 2026.

That’s the main issue with the plot of the film - it lacks a real villain and obstacle for Ida and Frank, individually or collectively. Without that most fundamental of groundings - motivation and obstacle - the film just becomes a very dazzling spectacle with nothing of substance to cling to.

It feels like Gyllenhaal started spinning way too many plates - the Ronnie Reed storyline for her brother, and detectives Jake and Malloy for her partner and Cruz - but didn’t follow a through-line for the big draw-cards, The Bride and Frankenstein.

And actually, it feels like maybe The Bride! should have been a six-part limited series for how patchy the plotting was - maybe these reveals and switcheroos would have worked better episodically, as opposed to cinematically in a two-hour squeeze?

Who is ‘The Bride’?

Ida/Bride already feels like an empty vessel - she can’t remember who she is, so relies on Frank to fill in the gaps (with elaborate lies) and it’s a shame that in the script Gyllenhaal does her a further disservice by not giving a righteous and rich background or motivation (until it’s too late, and then horribly under-cooked).

Jessie Buckley is phenomenal (no duh, she’s probably going to win the Oscar for Hamnet next week) - her physicality is particularly sublime; like a marionette doll learning to walk without strings. And the moments when the script allows her to cook and stew in fabulous madness are wonderful.

But it feels like the whole reason to update The Bride of Frankenstein - an Eve-like character designed purely to be companion to a made-man - is to actually for the first time make her stand on her own, not in relation to a man’s plot … but here; Ida is reliant on the men (namely: Jake, Frank, and Lupino) to make sense of her life and purpose in the plot, and that sucks, no matter how much Buckley plays the heck out of it.

Especially because Gyllenhaal shows instinct in wanting to adapt ‘The Bride’ in the first place - and to set it in the 1930s as women were experiencing a mini-revolution (the inter-war years saw huge shifts for women in the workforce, educational institutions, political and societal shifts …)

But the very fact that The Bride of Frankenstein was not a Mary Shelley construct, but rather that of a man - James Whale - who famously adapted and directed Boris Karloff in the 1931 film, and was then hounded by the studio to repeat the success …

One of my favourite YouTubers - Matt Baume - has a brilliant video essay on how much James Whale (a gay man) totally changed the face of Hollywood with his creature-features that borrowed heavily from his theatre-background, but also how disgruntled he was at his other work stagnating because of the success of his Frankenstein movies (literally, the monster he created for himself!)

• Frankenstein’s Gay Maker: James Whale, The Queen of Hollywood

I feel like Gyllenhaal’s heart was in the right place - and her love for this character-universe is there, it just needed more structure and to corral some of these BIG ideas into a chewable plot that we could - y’know - follow and digest.

Influence

Look; The Bride! is stunning and Maggie Gyllenhaal is leading with a full-throated fandom love on full display that is immediately recognisable and wonderful. That’s commendable, as director especially.

The film is set in the 1930s, but these head-nods to 30s pop-culture don’t just feel like her trying to only immerse audiences in a time-period, but rather show her visual appreciation for films and art, that - at a hunch - have shaped her as an artist. Not just her fashion style, but clearly her filmic influences too.

• Fritz Lang’s Metropolis is a really big visual touchpoint throughout, stunningly so particularly in costuming

• 1967 Bonnie and Clyde - I even suspected that casting Warren Beatty’s wife Annette Bening in the role of Dr. Euphronius was a head-nod to this seminal film, which ushered in a new wave of cinema and was particularly groundbreaking for the violence depicted.

• Bride of Frankenstein - obviously, though it doesn’t adapt the same storyline just the concept …

Overall

I love Frankenstein and I was really looking forward to this, but I think it needed longer to bake … or maybe should have been a bold limited-series, since Gyllenhaal’s screenwriter brain (otherwise tightly-controlled in her debut film The Lost Daughter) felt a little scattered here. Like her eyes were bigger than her stomach; or her ideas bigger than a 2-hour film could deliver.

I feel like my instinct that this probably would have worked better episodically was there, because … someone else did it for television, and back in 2014.

John Logan’s Penny Dreadful TV series that ran for three seasons on Showtime, in a gothic head-nod to the creature-feature and monster-universe;

Explorer Sir Malcolm Murray, American gunslinger Ethan Chandler, scientist Victor Frankenstein and medium Vanessa Ives unite to combat supernatural threats in Victorian London.

… and this show did indeed gift us a version of ‘The Bride’ in character Brónagh Croft, later known as Lily Frankenstein (played phenomenally by Billie Piper) opposite Rory Kinnear’s ‘the Creature’ of a mad-scientist.

Brónagh was an original take on the Bride of Frankenstein story, but her evolution was fascinating across three seasons - she goes from being a dying Irish immigrant prostitute to a vengeful, resurrected immortal (becoming a kind of valkyrie, taking vengeance on men who mistreat women in Victorian-era London, and eventually taking abused women in off the street, to nurture and train them in defence), eventually eclipsing her male makers and making them fear her.

Sorry, Maggie - but … that’s the kind of treatment the Bride of Frankenstein deserves - to break away from the men that made her and step into her vengeful, frightening self … and I just didn’t get it from The Bride! the way I hoped I would.

2/5

In a new tale from the ton, eternal bachelor Benedict Bridgerton finally meets his match: a captivating lady's maid in disguise at a masquerade ball.

Season four of Bridgerton - the historical romance family saga based on Julia Quinn’s book series - has just concluded, and it is by all accounts a smash-hit in the fandom.

I’m going to give a review of this fourth season, and put forward my theory on the best mindset to come to the book-series with, while also theorising why one season in particular was the least-successful, through no fault of the television adaptation.

Bridgerton Background

To remind everyone; Julia Quinn’s first novel in the Bridgerton series was The Duke and I, published in 2000 and releasing one-book-a-year for 6 years, concluding with On the Way to the Wedding in 2006.

She has since published a spinoff-prequel series called The Rokesby Series which is about one generation before the Bridgertons and following the Rokesby family, who are neighbours and close friends of the Bridgertons.

The first book - Daphne and Simon’s - was adapted after Shonda Rhimes purchased the rights, following her 2017 exclusive, multi-year development deal with Netflix. The landmark agreement moved her production company, Shondaland, away from ABC to produce new series and projects exclusively for the streaming service. And Bridgerton was in fact the first project between Rhimes and Netflix, and has proven incredibly fruitful;

• Why Shonda Rhimes owns the bragging rights to Bridgerton

The fist season dropped at a tricky but fortuitous time, in December 2020 - becoming an instant smash-hit for the streamer.

• A Seattle Romance Brings the Bodice-Ripping Revolution to Netflix - Local author Julia Quinn gets a splashy adaptation from Shonda Rhimes on Christmas Day—and, finally, the respect her genre deserves.

While the covid period proved beneficiary for the first season and bingeing, the second season - Anthony and Kate’s - was hit with covid-positive setbacks;

• ‘Bridgerton’: Netflix Shuts Down Season 2 Shoot For Second Time After Another Covid Case

Further delays came in 2023 with the Writers Guild of America strike;

• Shonda Rhimes Shows Support for WGA Strike, Says Writers Being Unable to Make a Livable Wage “Is a Problem”

A highly-acclaimed spin-off series about Queen Charlotte and King George was written as an original one-season show by Rhimes and Quinn and aired in 2023, but when the third season of the show returned in 2024 - Colin and Penelope’s - the show aired in two-parts one-month apart, having been affected by the aforementioned filming-delays prior.

It is now a given that the show will air in two-parts every season, as happened this year for season four - Benedict and Sophie’s - and that there will continue to be a one-year hiatus after each season while production films.

And while rumours of another spinoff abound …

• The ‘Bridgerton’ director basically just confirmed a spin-off is in the works

… nothing is confirmed

Bridgerton Books

As I have said elsewhere, I semi-enjoy Quinn’s Bridgerton series but it’s not my favourite. For the most part, I think it’s a case of the television show being better than the source-material and the book-to-TV changes have improved the universe.

For instance; Queen Charlotte is present in the books only superficially since it’s set during her reign, and Lady Danbury is a constant across the series as a somewhat loveable if meddling side-character - but the show has bolstered their roles, and solidified their friendship considerably.

And - of course - the biggest change from book-to-show is that under Rhimes’ production, the television series opted for open-casting and diverse actors to portray characters understood to be white in the books.

• Yes, Bridgerton does mirror real life with its diverse cast. Here’s the history.

There’s a head-nod to history here that then bends into alternate-history, spinning around the real ambiguity over Queen Charlotte’s racial identity;

• Was this Britain’s first black queen? Queen Charlotte was the wife of George III and, like him, of German descent. But did she also have African ancestry?

The show has been both praised and criticised for this anachronism, but it’s undeniable that it changed the landscape and scope of period-dramas forever;

• Bridgerton’s first East Asian family is a beautiful thing, say cast

• The Hollow Diversity of Bridgerton - Despite its fresh take on period dramas with its color-blind casting, there is very little that the hit Netflix show does for diversity and representation.

• Is Bridgerton Woke? - Color-blind vs color-conscious casting in Hollywood

• Quasi-color consciousness: Casting, race, and sexual violence in Netflix’s Bridgerton

• ‘Why is Bridgerton’s race twisting acceptable?’ The real problem with the show’s Black fantasy

Bridgerton doesn’t really do “poor”, but the real elephant in the ballroom is slavery. At the time Queen Charlotte takes place, the brutal mechanics of the slave trade were in full swing. The abolitionist movement was just getting started, but the slave trade was not legally abolished in the British empire until 1807, and slavery itself not until 1833. During George III’s reign, 1.5 million Africans were captured and shipped to plantations in North America and the Caribbean. In 1800, the slave trade made up more than 10% of Britain’s GDP. These are the ill-gotten riches on which Bridgerton’s (and Britain’s) world of palaces, parties and gigantic wigs was built, but in the show itself, this side of the story is ignored. There are a few tiny references to “the colonies”, but slavery, human rights and abolition are never mentioned.

“It’s an absurd take on Black history,” says Steven I Martin, Black British author and historian. “It is set at a time when Britain was the largest trader in human lives on the planet. Slavery was central to the British economy.” Martin accuses Bridgerton of “inviting, or fomenting, the forgetting or overlooking of the realities of that period”.

The books also follow a classic family-saga structure where upcoming couples are mentioned, and continue to make appearances even after their story-arc has concluded. Bridgerton the show has much more adeptly interwoven multiple storylines simultaneously, even if the show has had to tweak the familial aspect due to departing actors;

• ‘Bridgerton’ Showrunner Addresses Daphne and Simon’s Season 4 Absence: ‘They’re Hypothetically There’. The showrunner talks about recasting and what made sense for the characters.

However, I have made a video about the fact that the biggest and most compelling change from the books-to-television is that the show has made the Bridgerton siblings - the men in particular - far more bearable for television.

But overall, the Bridgerton siblings are generally the worst characters in their own books. Yes, even the sisters - Daphne in her first season commits sexual assault against her sleeping husband, just as portrayed in the book too;

• Why We Need to Talk About Sexual Assault & Bridgerton

Anthony in the second book is physically rough with his intended, Kate, on multiple occasions - the character greatly improved in season two by the actor portraying him being played by Jonathan Bailey, which just goes to show the old meme is true;

And even Benedict Bridgerton - the subject of third book, An Offer from a Gentleman, but the fourth season - repeatedly and annoyingly pressures a woman to become his mistress in the book, but is once again greatly improved by more nuanced writing and acting in the show.

For more on the book-to-screen adaptations, I enjoy Dominic Noble’s Bridgerton ~ Lost in Adaptation YouTube series.

Bridgerton Season Four

Season four of Bridgerton is indeed Benedict’s story, and it borrows heavily from not only the ‘forbidden love’ trope, but specifically; Cinderella.

From the book blurb;

Sophie Beckett never dreamed she’d be able to sneak into Lady Bridgerton’s famed masquerade ball—or that “Prince Charming” would be waiting there for her! Though the daughter of an earl, Sophie has been relegated to the role of servant by her disdainful stepmother. But now, spinning in the strong arms of the debonair and devastatingly handsome Benedict Bridgerton, she feels like royalty. Alas, she knows all enchantments must end when the clock strikes midnight.

Ever since that magical night, a radiant vision in silver has blinded Benedict to the attractions of any other—except, perhaps this alluring and oddly familiar beauty dressed in housemaid’s garb whom he feels compelled to rescue from a most disagreeable situation. He has sworn to find and wed his mystery miss, but this breathtaking maid makes him weak with wanting her. Yet, if he offers his heart, will Benedict sacrifice his only chance for a fairy tale love?

In the TV series, Benedict is played by theatre-trained Luke Thompson, and Sophie Beckett becomes Sopihe Baek, played by Korean-Australian actor Yerin Ha;

• Bridgerton Star Yerin Ha Opens Up About Representing the Asian Community in Netflix Hit: ‘We Deserve These Spaces’ (Exclusive)

And I’ve got to say … An Offer from a Gentleman has long been my favourite book of Julia Quinn’s series, and I am deeply unsurprised that it is also - in my humble opinion - the best season of the TV show thus far.

A lot of that has to do twofold with the familiar plot-pattern of the Cinderella storyline, and the first time that this universe - which focuses on a titled family - has cast their eyes downward to the “lower-classes” in an upstairs-downstairs narrative … but, in all honesty, 90% of the season four success is down to the chemistry of the two leads playing Benedict and Sophie. As Shonda Rhimes herself praised Thompson and Ha; “To me, they have a chemistry like no other.”

Their press-tour in particular has been delightful to watch. Not just to see everyone speak so glowingly about Yerin Ha’s performance and sunshine-y personality on set, but to have Luke Thompson speak so earnestly and profoundly on the need for intimacy-coordinators has even been refreshing and sorely needed. As well as being bereft at the thought of no more Bridgerton for one year now that this season has concluded, I’m even sad to think we won’t get this level of press-tour hijinks and hilarity;

• Luke Thompson and Yerin Ha Come to the End of Their Dance

I even think the show has made fantastic decisions in evolving the friendship between Lady Danbury and Queen Charlotte this season, and continuing to interweave Francesca Bridgerton’s story - from her book, When He Was Wicked - just as they did previously in season three, when they laid the groundwork for her tale … which comes to a sad conclusion, and new chapter in season four.

All of these decisions made for a really rich and multilayered season, full of extreme highs and lows - pulling out melodrama and tragedy that feels like it was somewhat missing from Colin and Penelope’s third season, by comparison …

Bridgerton needs complexity

I think people often mistake the Romance genre - and Historical Romance - for staid and safe, when its drawcard is often the exact opposite.

One of the reasons we love reading and watching Historical Romance isn’t just for the ballgowns, and charming courtship - it works best when the restraints and constraints of the time provide interesting barriers and limitations for the characters. We like the rigid social-structures to dictate stakes and drama, how front-and-centre the class-warfare is and the predicaments they throw characters into. I completely agree with Shonda Rhimes’ take on this, and I think it’s why she understood the mechanics of the universe so well;

• Bridgerton isn’t a romance, it’s a workplace drama - Shonda Rhimes

“I didn’t see it as a romance,” she says. “It was more of a workplace drama.

“The women don’t have power in other areas of their lives, the power is in how they marry, so it becomes a workplace. And that’s where the drama is.

“More importantly, I could see myself in them. If a black woman in 21st century America can see herself in regency England, it’s a good story.”

I’d even venture to say that the most successful Bridgerton seasons are the ones that amplify these barriers and dramas, and put the deeply personal on full-display for all of society to see and commentate on - it’s a version of how we all see our problems and innermost battles and demons, terrified that everyone is watching and judging us for our foibles.

A break-down of the protagonists of each season, and their inner struggles and stakes and how they play on a public stage;

And this also goes some way to explaining why season three of Bridgerton was both the worst book, and destined to be the worst season. Romancing Mister Bridgerton is about;

Colin Bridgerton is tired of being thought nothing but an empty-headed charmer, tired of the neverending sameness of his life, and, most of all, tired of everyone’s preoccupation with the notorious gossip columnist Lady Whistledown, who can’t seem to publish an edition without mentioning him in the first paragraph. But when Colin returns to London from a trip abroad, he discovers nothing in his life is quite the same—especially Penelope Featherington! The girl who was always simply… there is suddenly the girl haunting his dreams. But when he discovers that Penelope has secrets of her own, this elusive bachelor must decide…is she his biggest threat—or his promise of a happy ending?

It’s a friends-to-lovers, unrequited-love trope book and sadly on the Bridgerton stage it doesn’t stack up against its siblings. The television show somewhat improved Colin (played by Luke Newton) and Penelope’s (Nicola Coughlan) story - mostly by not insisting that Penelope’s makeover hinge on weight-loss as it did in the novel, and by the sheer star-power of the two leads who did an admirable job with meh material.

But the real issue was that the stakes were as low as Colin’s personality is shallow - probably because the book came out in 2002 at the height of “The Makeover” movie-trope (She’s All That and The Princess Diaries) and it does feel quite stuck in an early-00s body dysmorphia quagmire that does huge disservice to both romantic leads.

Compared to his siblings, Colin’s issues aren’t enough to sink your teeth into for a full season, and probably needed considerably more layers of complexity to stack up against Penelope’s far more interesting storyline … I firmly believe the fault mostly lies with Colin being so subpar, and the book itself being the worst of the lot;

Part of the reason Benedict and Sophie work so well - enough to possibly take the crown of best season pair - is that they are overcoming more than their personal inner-conflicts, but also huge external ones (y’know, just the whole way that society is structured and conspiring to keep them apart).

I’d say my second-favourite couple in the Bridgerton universe is Charlotte and George - again, partly because actors India Amarteifio, and Corey Mylchreest had incredible chemistry with perhaps the best declaration of love - but mostly because it perfectly balanced inner-turmoil and outer-conflict, using the weight of the crown and dedication to the kingdom alongside complex mental health struggles … it felt impossible, and had great pathos amongst the fabulous romance.

Benedict and Sophie’s season has likewise perfected this recipe, and I am extremely hopeful that the groundwork of sadness already laid for Francesca and Eloise Bridgerton - in very different, but no less profound ways - will see their seasons on similar addictive melodramatic rollercoasters;

• ‘Bridgerton’ Season 5: Clues Point To Whether Eloise Or Francesca’s Story Is Next

The key to Historical Romance - like all good narratives - is to have stakes worth fighting for, and obstacles that seem insurmountable. And to do as Rhimes and never forget; the ton is basically an industry and Bridgerton a workplace-drama taking place in its corridors.

• When They Burned the Butterfly by Wen-yi Lee

In this fierce, glamorous adult fantasy debut, Silvia Moreno-Garcia meets Fonda Lee, with the feverish intensity of R.F. Kuang's Poppy War trilogy.

Singapore, 1972: Newly independent and grappling for power in a fast-modernizing world. Here, gangsters in Chinese secret societies are the last conduits of their ancestors' migrant gods, and the back alleys where they fight are the last place magic has not been assimilated and legislated away.

Loner schoolgirl Adeline Siow has never needed more company than the flame she can summon at her fingertips. But when her mother dies in a house fire with a butterfly seared onto her skin and Adeline hunts down a girl she saw in a back-alley barfight—a girl with a butterfly tattoo—she discovers she’s far from alone.

Ang Tian is a Red Butterfly: one of a gang of girls who came from nothing, sworn to a fire goddess and empowered to wreak vengeance on the men that abuse and underestimate them. Adeline’s mother led a double life as their elusive patron, Madam Butterfly. Now that she’s dead, Adeline’s bloodline is the sole thing sustaining the goddess. Between her search for her mother’s killer and the gang’s succession crisis, Adeline becomes quickly entangled with the girls’ dangerous world, and even more so with the charismatic Tian.

But no home lasts long around here. Ambitious and paranoid neighbor gangs hunt at the edges of Butterfly territory, and bodies are turning up in the red light district suffused with a strange new magic. Adeline may have found her place for once, but with the streets changing by the day, it may take everything she is to keep it.

I got this from Amplify Bookstore - just browsing their shelves. I knew absolutely nothing about this book or author, but I trust that blurb so much - and the head-nod to Silvia Moreno-Garcia and R.F. Kuang.

Watching

• Mussolini: Son of the Century on SBS on Demand

A portrait of Benito Mussolini and his political rise, from the foundation of the Italian Fasci to the imposition of the most ferocious dictatorship Italy has ever known.

An absolutely fabulous mini-series, based on the book by Antonio Scurati, and directed by Joe Wright (yes, of 2005 Pride & Prejudice fame!). The series is in Italian, and I know that may sound like a “duh?!” but apparently British director Joe Wright was at one point considering doing it with no accents in English, similar to Chernobyl. But I think he was wise to nix that idea, because there is something very powerful about hearing Mussolini’s various speeches and fascist slogans in original Italian, and actor Luca Marinelli (from The Old Guard!) as Duce is spine-chillingly good, and I can’t imagine this not being performed by an expressive Italian actor.

I have subsequently enjoyed delving into the behind-the-scenes of this impressive role, to find just how much Marinelli really didn’t want to take it on (purely because his family is staunchly anti-fascist);

• ‘Mussolini: Son of the Century’ Star Luca Marinelli Transforms Into Italian Dictator in Behind-the-Scenes Clip: ‘I Didn’t Really Know How to Prepare for This Role’ (EXCLUSIVE)

But I think there’s such power in the honesty of this series, which works to especially highlight the absolutely unhinged loser-dom of Mussolini and his fascist thugs;

• Mussolini: Son of the Century review – a brilliantly performed portrait of a pathetic monster

And this isn’t the creators making anything up either, they’re portraying the history accurately - even if there are occasional to-camera asides from Mussolini, breaking the fourth wall only to share his most two-faced nature with the audience (who can also take gleeful solace in the fact that his end will come - eventually! - and it will be bloody … as the saying goes; “There’s always room at Piazzale Loreto.”)

• Why I loved the new Mussolini drama – by an expert in Italian fascism

Still, it’s a brutal and confronting series - even as it has dark-humour sprinkled in too. The parallels to the here and now - Trump, Netanyahu, and Putin - are there in abundance, and more frightening than ever. I also found myself thinking a series like Son of the Century was prescient viewing, for how it meticulously details the rise in far-right thuggery and anti-democratic manipulations, all in the prelude to war which is very much where we are now;

• We are now living in a pre-war world, not a post-war one

I also tip my cap to director Joe Wright who has delivered this brutalist tale with pizazz - and heavy doses of homage to Italian cinema. I’m even more impressed since confirming Wright does not speak Italian, and directed his actors by listening for the musicality of their impassioned performances, as he explained to Vulture;

• This Might Be the Most Ambitious and Delirious Thing Joe Wright Has Ever Done

You made an entire TV show in Italian. So, how is your Italian?

Pathetic. My Italian is pathetic, it’s dreadful, but luckily, Italian actors are so expressive that you can kind of understand what they’re saying and whether they’re telling the truth just by the melody of their voice and the actions of their hands. If I didn’t speak English and I was trying to do this with British actors, who are so text-based and far less expressive, it might not have worked. Or with American actors, who are so psychoanalysis-based.

With the Italians, their roots going all the way back to Commedia dell’arte and this very performative sense physically and musically, it felt possible. I obviously had the English translation and the Italian script side-by-side. But I remembered Danny Boyle doing Slumdog Millionaire and much of that being in Hindi. I thought, If he can do that in Hindi, I think I can do this in Italian.

A brilliant series, and I’m only sad there doesn’t seem to be plans for a second season covering the WWII period more in-depth.

Listening

• The Dig Tree: A True Story of Bravery, Insanity, and the Race to Discover Australia’s Wild Frontier By Sarah Murgatroyd, Narrated by Catherine Milte

Back in December, I read this great Guardian article;

• Burke and Wills died as Victorian heroes, but their expedition was a farce. Now Melbourne is rethinking their statue. Their quest captured the imagination of the colony and became part of Australia’s foundation narrative. But it was a debacle led by an eccentric man with a poor sense of direction

I got such a chuckle out of reading about the bumbling escapades of these buffoon explorers (no, that’s not fair - mostly Burke was the ridiculous one) and one paragraph really stood out to me;

In her celebrated 2002 book The Dig Tree, the late historian Sarah Murgatroyd wrote of Burke’s poor sense of direction.

She portrayed a man who “had never travelled beyond the settled districts of Australia, who had no experience of exploration and who was notorious for getting lost on his way home from the pub’’. He possessed little bushcraft. In its 1969 entry on Burke the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) described him as “impulsive, quick-tempered, arbitrary, generous, tender-hearted and charming … recklessly brave, a daredevil with a thirst for distinction as yet unsatisfied’’.

That just absolutely tickled me, and I thought; “If this is a non-fiction book all about what an embarrassment of an explorer Burke was, then I’d be keen to read it!”

So I snapped up an audiobook from Libro.fm and got to listening … and my instincts were proven 100% correct. From the jump, it’s a rollicking and fascinating read and Sarah Murgatroyd manages to imbue this true history with such liveliness and create characters of all on the doomed expedition. I was only about 25% in when I got giddy, thinking of looking up Murgatroyd’s other books she has written since this Dig Tree published in 2002, only to be absolutely gutted when I read her biography on her publisher’s website;

Sarah Murgatroyd died of cancer in March 2002, a few weeks after The Dig Tree was published to universal acclaim.

It was a most strange sensation to read this magnificent non-fiction work about a doomer expedition, with its own inherent sense of tragedy attached. Still, I recommend it most highly - it’s been a long time since I had such an interactive audiobook listen too (while walking the dog I kept muttering “oh, come ON!” at many of the expedition’s wrong-headed stupidity.)

Wearing

• Dorkus Designs necklaces

Dorkus Design is the brainchild of Melbourne-based designer and maker Stephanie Watt, specialising in jewellery and form play. Stephanie crafts her pieces primarily using laser-cut materials, which she meticulously finishes and assembles by hand. Her signature style is characterised by minimalistic yet eye-catching designs. Stephanie’s affectionate use of bold, hand-painted colours imbues each piece with its own unique mood.

I love my DD necklaces (I have the blood orange petal necklace - pictured above - and the red tulip necklace). I purchase mine from the coolest store in Melbourne, Pinky’s - in Preston. I love supporting small and indie Aussie creators, and Pinky’s is one of the best places to find them - like Dorkus Designs!

Going

• Pinky’s Melbourne

With that in mind, it’d be remiss of me not to shout-out one of my favourite stores in my city!

They’re just the cutest store with the sweetest people and coolest shit. Even their ‘about us’ page is so epic;

You know that warm, fizzy feeling you get when things are exciting and overwhelming, in a good way? That’s what it’s like to visit Pinky’s – our happy little gift shop in Preston. A haven for colour, creativity and community, there is nothing we love more than sitting down together and selecting amazing things for our customers (and ourselves…) It really brings us the MOST joy! Pinky’s is a wonderland of curated wares we love from Australian and international designers. Pinky’s has something special for everyone, that you won’t find everywhere else.

Pinky’s was founded by us – stylist Beckie Littler and designer Emily Green – in 2018. We first met at playgroup when our daughters were a year old and, not long after, decided to take a leap into the unknown and start our dream shop together. We only sell what we really believe in: quality, ethically produced pieces we are proud to represent.

From 1st birthdays and 40th parties to engagements and anniversaries, we have an ever-changing selection of gifts for all occasions at a range of price points. Whatever or whoever you’re looking for, chances are you’ll find it at Pinky’s. And we’ll wrap it!

Pop in and visit the lovely team at our shop in Preston, or peruse online. And if you want to be the first to hear about all our coolest, newest stuff, sign up for our newsletter here – they’re really good/cute, promise!

I totally understand if you’re reading this and you’re not Vic-based or near Melbourne, so luckily you can follow them on Instagram and buy online too.

I am obsessed with The Artful Dodger - an Australian historical Oliver Twist FanFiction television series that began in 2023, just had a second season drop in February this year (with strong predictions of a third to be announced soon);

In 1850s Australia, the past of Jack Dawkins, a former pickpocket who has become a surgeon, resurfaces when an old acquaintance, Fagin, arrives and lures him back into a life of crime.

Oliver Twist Genesis

Jack Dawkins being ‘the Artful Dodger,’ - a young character in Charles Dickens’s 1838 novel Oliver Twist, who brings the little orphan to join elderly man Fagin’s merry band of pickpockets and juvenile delinquents.

At the end of the novel, Dodger is caught red-handed with a stolen snuffbox and sentenced to ‘transportation’ - the inference being banishment to Australia’s penal colonies (though ‘Australia’ or ‘Van Diemen’s Land’ as the British also called it, is never explicitly named in the novel).

We sadly don’t even get to see a final goodbye for Dodger in the book, rather it’s Fagin and others in his orbit who explain his fate which happens off the page;

(with thanks to Project Gutenberg for the excerpts);

“I’m doubtful about it,” replied Fagin, with a sigh. “If they don’t get any fresh evidence, it’ll only be a summary conviction, and we shall have him back again after six weeks or so; but, if they do, it’s a case of lagging. They know what a clever lad he is; he’ll be a lifer. They’ll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.”

“What do you mean by lagging and a lifer?” demanded Mr. Bolter. “What’s the good of talking in that way to me; why don’t yer speak so as I can understand yer?”

Fagin was about to translate these mysterious expressions into the vulgar tongue; and, being interpreted, Mr. Bolter would have been informed that they represented that combination of words, “transportation for life,” when the dialogue was cut short by the entry of Master Bates, with his hands in his breeches-pockets, and his face twisted into a look of semi-comical woe.

“It’s all up, Fagin,” said Charley, when he and his new companion had been made known to each other.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more’s a coming to ’dentify him; and the Artful’s booked for a passage out,” replied Master Bates. “I must have a full suit of mourning, Fagin, and a hatband, to wisit him in, afore he sets out upon his travels. To think of Jack Dawkins—lummy Jack—the Dodger—the Artful Dodger—going abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box! I never thought he’d a done it under a gold watch, chain, and seals, at the lowest. Oh, why didn’t he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour nor glory!”

It’s a really lacklustre end for such a fascinating character in the novel - far more interesting is Dodger than the eponymous Oliver, even (or ‘wet lettuce,’ as the television FanFic series nicknames him).

No wonder then, that creators - James McNamara, David Maher, and David Taylor - have spun an entire series extending Dickens’ metaverse around his most interesting characters, wondering what exactly became of Jack ‘Dodger’ Dawkins when he landed in Australia … the answer is; he joined the navy briefly, studied (somewhat) under a ship’s surgeon and is tasked with becoming local doctor for the fictional colony town of Port Victory, located in Sydney.

The Artful Dodger

When the show begins it’s the 1850s - roughly 15-years after the events of the novel - and in episode one a new convict transport has docked, and Dawkins is confronted by his old father-figure Fagin, who has also managed to get transport to Australia and quickly becomes a pain in (now) Dr. Dawkin’s side, as he instantly begins scheming how he can work the colony to his advantage.

British actor Thomas Brodie-Sangster - best known as the lovestruck kid running through an airport in Love, Actually and ‘Newt’ in The Maze Runner franchise, leads the charge as Dodger. It’ll come as a shock to those of us who seasonally re-watch Love, Actually that the little kid is now a grown 35-years-old, and even more delightfully shocking; that he’s a charmingly adept and rather swoony leading-man, with some retro Hugh Grant-airs about him.

Now, I don’t think it’s only for the sake of that fabulous tagline - the Dodger will see you now - that they made Jack Dawkins into a doctor. I think the creators did a wonderful job of taking the rich character-study offered in Dickens’ novel, and imagining what a little cosplaying adult-toff child would grow into, if he had to come of age on a convict and navy ship.

The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer, was about his own age: but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had even seen. He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all the airs and manners of a man. He was short of his age: with rather bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes. His hat was stuck on the top of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every moment—and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which brought it back to its old place again. He wore a man’s coat, which reached nearly to his heels. He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy trousers; for there he kept them. He was, altogether, as roystering and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or something less, in the bluchers.

The result is Thomas Brodie-Sangster playing Dodger with a deep hurt and canniness to him, but also a surety swagger that gives a compelling and competent bedside manner. There are also head-nods to his movie counterpart Jack Wild, who played Dodger in the 1968 movie musical Oliver! in both dress and a few Easter eggs to the set (according to IMDb; a sign outside the Cat & Bagpipes can be seen advertising Wild’s Celebrated Ales, after Jack Wild).

But where Brodie-Sangster and Dodger really shine is in the surprising switch-up to hear-throb leading-man (more on that in a moment).

Fagin

Second only to Dodger for fascinating characters in Oliver Twist is Fagin, who meets an untimely end, convicted and sentenced to death at the gallows … and though Oliver has a traumatising final visit with him in Newgate Prison, the creators of the TV series shrewdly know that we don’t actually witness Fagin’s death on the page … leaving the door wide open for a Lazarus uprising in the television show;

The door of the cell opened, and the attendants returned.

“Press on, press on,” cried Fagin. “Softly, but not so slow. Faster, faster!”

The men laid hands upon him, and disengaging Oliver from his grasp, held him back. He struggled with the power of desperation, for an instant; and then sent up cry upon cry that penetrated even those massive walls, and rang in their ears until they reached the open yard.

It was some time before they left the prison. Oliver nearly swooned after this frightful scene, and was so weak that for an hour or more, he had not the strength to walk.

Day was dawning when they again emerged. A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking. Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all—the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.

In The Artful Dodger, Fagin is played brilliantly and lovingly-sinisterly by British actor David Thewlis, best known as Remus Lupin in the Harry Potter movie franchise.

It works well here, that for a certain generation of TV-viewers we’re prone to seeing and trusting Thewlis as a mentor and assured father-figure, and much like his marks we may well fall for his stunts initially as Fagin - before realising he is deliciously and devilishly untrustworthy from top to bottom.

That Thewlis also looks like a fabulous stand-in for Ron Moody’s 1968 Fagin is just the cherry on top;

In Dicken’s book, Fagin reads very uncomfortable through a modern lens … he’s referred to throughout by both his name, and as ‘the Jew’ - and, yes, that is indeed a lot of antisemitism focused on one of the most famous Jewish characters in English literature (up there with Shakespeare’s Shylock from The Merchant of Venice) - that he is a crooked thief, murderer and fraudster who gets orphaned children to do his evil bidding, has not gone unnoticed by modern audiences;

• Charles Dickens’s Anti-Semitism

• Figuring Out Fagin

Michael Getler in that PBS article even notes;

Dickens, himself, eventually had second thoughts and halted the printing of the book about halfway through so as to refer in later chapters to Fagin by name rather than the 257 times in the first 38 chapters where he is called “the Jew.” And Dickens later wrote what proved to be his final novel, “Our Mutual Friend,” in which a major character is Jewish “whose goodness is almost as complete as Fagin’s is evil,” as Vallely described it.

Maybe for better or worse, Fagin is pretty firmly atheist in The Artful Dodger - so much so that he’s even willing to rip off the Catholic Church in an elaborate plot - thus, his Jewishness is not remarked upon or mentioned in the series, and may well be intended non-existent in the show; and while that may be erasure, I think it was necassary for modern sensibilities.

Lady Belle

Rounding-out the cast top-billing is newly invented character (whose family especially, feel like an amalgamation of all the ‘toffs’ mentioned in Dickens’ novel) - Lady Belle Fox, the Governor’s daughter played by Australian actor Maia Mitchell.

In the early 00’s Mitchell was in the kid’s show Mortified, but got her big American break at the age of 20 when she scored a leading-role on five-seasons of family drama The Fosters, and then also co-leading its sexier spinoff series Good Trouble alongside co-star Cierra Ramirez. Mitchell seemed pretty settled in Hollywood, but during Covid and the pandemic she was cut-off from Australia and her family, and has since spoken openly about how that precipitated her leaving Good Trouble early, to return and settle home - thus paving the way for her to lead this Aussie historical drama;

• Maia Mitchell on Her ‘Heartbreaking Decision’ to Leave ‘Good Trouble’ and Teary Final Days on Set

Clearly with a name like Lady Belle, the character is a small head-nod to Belle from Beauty and the Beast - but unlike the 2017 remake with Emma Watson, that tried to further update the already outlier female bookish protagonist with head-scratching pseudo-feminism that fell flat, as Zoe Williams pointed out for The Guardian at the time;

I do, however, feel bound to point out that Belle’s invention is a washing machine, a contraption she rigs up to a horse, to do her domestic work while she teaches another, miniature feminist how to read. The underlying message baked into this pie is that laundry is women’s work, which the superbly clever woman will delegate to a horse while she spreads literacy. It would be better if she had used her considerable intellect to question why she had to wash anything at all, while her father did nothing more useful than mend clocks.

… instead we have Lady Belle in Artful Dodger who feels like a truly feminist and fresh take in historical fiction, much more in keeping with modern-day sensibilities - anachronistic, maybe, but far more fascinating. She is a young woman who dreams of becoming a doctor, and is teaching herself with every book and study she can get her hands on. Yes, there are personal ulterior motives to her ambitions - but Mitchell plays her with charming capriciousness and capability. She’s not bossy, she’s the boss energy - and we love to see it.

Rounding out the Fox family is the bumbling but loveable Governor played by Damien Garvey, Susie Porter as his formidable Governess wife (who is really running the show) and Belle’s quirky sister Fanny, played by Lucy-Rose Leonard.

Fan-edits don’t lie

I recently had it explained to my geriatric Millennial self, that the way to know if a piece of pop-culture is piping hot is to judge it by the fan-edits on TikTok. And indeed, I first watched Dodger in 2024 the same year that I joined TikTok - it had been on air since November 2023 by that point and I swear, “fan-edits” (fan-videos spliced together over trending music, but with fantastic edit skills especially - picking out all the juiciest and especially the most romantic tidbits from the show) were everywhere, and compelling. So much so, they pushed me to watch.

For example;

And yes, undoubtedly, aside from intrigue about what exactly did happen to Dodger after the events of Oliver Twist - the promise of a forbidden romance with ‘Uptown Girl’ underlying sensibilities (She’s been living in her uptown world / I bet she’s never had a backstreet guy) is what really compelled me and then hooked me on the show.

Maia Mitchell and Thomas Brodie-Sangster do not disappoint when it comes to the yearning and romance between Jack and Belle - it ignites from episode one and continues to burn throughout Season 1, with delightful sparks in Season 2 and the cliffhanger promise of more if there is going to be a Season 3 (and I swear on all that is Holy and Dolly Parton that if there’s no Season 3 I will riot!)

They are really what has made the show turn into a bonfire over on TikTok - with people even favourably comparing Dodger to Benedict Bridgerton in the latest season of that Netflix show, and even deciding that Jack Dawkins is the more romantic of the two (ahem - agreed!)

But what I think really elevates this romance is the underlying discussions of class, colonialism and patriarchy throughout - it especially hit me as I finished watching Season 2 of The Artful Dodger around the same time as I masochistically subjected myself to Emerald Fennell’s “Wuthering Heights” that bumbles around the Moors looking for anything to say - let alone anything interesting - on the topic of classism.

Meanwhile, Artful Dodger is adeptly discussing social-class in every episode, as;

• Dawkins tries to overcome his London slum background to be seen as a respectable doctor in this penal colony

• Patients are often trying to be seen as human within an inhumane medical and colonial system

• Lady Belle constantly realises the limitations of her wealth and privilege that end at her gender when it comes to trying to fulfil her medical ambitions, and;

• Peppered through the show are modern-day reminders of colonialism, and on whose land Port Victory stands.

A strong Australian show

Artful Dodger has a wonderful mix of characters from various backgrounds, that both add to the sense that this is an up-and-coming trading hub and evolving colony, but doesn’t forget that so-called “Australia” has the World’s Oldest Continuous Living Culture. From a modern-day standpoint too, it’s refreshing to see an Aussie show that - historical it may be - leans into the melting-pot of cultures that we should always celebrate and represent on our screens.

Vivienne Awosoga plays nurse Hetty in Dawkins’ hospital - she has a British father of Nigerian descent, and an Australian mother. Albert Latailakepa is of Samoan (Luatuanu’u) and Tongan (Ma’ufanga) descent, and plays henchman-for-hire, Aputi. Aljin Abella, also known as Alin Abella, is an Australian actor of Filipino descent who plays Fagin’s dynamite expert Bayani ‘Flashbang’ Rivera. Irish-Zimbabwean actor Brigid Zengeni plays Rosemary ‘Rotty’ Falkirk who runs the local tavern, and in Season 2 becomes deeply embroiled in Fagin’s various ploys.

Then there’s Luke Carroll - an Aboriginal man of the Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal peoples, who plays medical-equipment inventor Tim Billiberllary. In Season 2 especially, Billiberllary is the voice of sense and objection to various of Fagin’s schemes that revolve around fake land-rights … that are not his to give, or take.

Season 1 also sees a secondary storyline spin around Frances ‘Red’ Scrubbs, an increasingly notorious highway bush-woman played thrillingly and ferociously by Larrakia Aboriginal actor Miranda Tapsell, who has also written for the TV show behind-the-scenes.

It is quite clear that there’s a diverse screenwriter’s room at play in The Artful Dodger, for all the interwoven discussions of class and colonialism so mired in the colony and deliciously picked over in every episode.

Finally, rounding out the Aussie cast are the various ‘villains’ (and red-herrings) of the two seasons; Damon Herriman does an absolutely masterful turn as Captain Lucien Gaines in Season 1. Tim Minchin - who I am forever lukewarm on - plays Darius Cracksworth, a big-wick crook across the two seasons. And Luke Bracey has been a most interesting new addition to Season 2, playing Inspector Henry Boxer - a complicated and enticing new policeman in town, whose inner-turmoil and dark past could see him go down many different paths in the future …

Australian talent on show

Produced by Curio Pictures, Beach Road Pictures and Sony Pictures Television for Disney+ (streaming in America on Hulu, via its Disney+ partnership) - The Artful Dodger has done an incredible job of blending new and old faces on our small screens, and showing what Australian productions can do.

Curio Pictures are on a bit of a winning streak - having produced the brilliant and brutal adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker-prize winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North, with hot-right-now star Jacob Elordi in the lead, they are making a name for themselves particularly in this historical-fiction television landscape which I find so interesting and refreshing.

The show also has various directors, but Gracie Otto has helmed five so far (and her social-media is always good for behind-the-scenes sneak-peeks!) and she’s likewise been on a real winning-streak, directing everything from Heartbreak High to Ladies in Black.

It’s no small feat to see so many incredible Aussie creatives behind and on our screens. And as I write this, we’ve had devastating News in the industry about the shut-down of Matchbox Pictures;

• Why Australia’s Matchbox Pictures is being shut down - Matchbox was closed by its parent company, Universal International Studios, and the closure has resulted in the loss of 30 full-time equivalent positions.

• Why one of Australia’s most successful TV production companies is being shut down

• Australian screen industry crushed as Universal shutters Matchbox Pictures, with 30 jobs lost - Peak screenwriting body says the closure is a reminder industry cannot rely on ‘whims of international studios to keep us afloat’

Streaming has decimated a lot of our industry (as has poor decisions by Government that has variously gutted and under-funded the industry for far too long);

• New streaming quotas are being floated but data shows Australian kids’ TV has already been decimated

So it feels really thrilling to see this little Aussie historical drama going toe-to-toe with the likes of Bridgerton for Fan-Edits and audience love on an international stage;

• Hulu’s Under-the-Radar Sherlock Holmes Replacement Is 1 of the Most Popular Shows in the World

That it’s historical especially, means our talented artists really get a chance to shine in the spotlight for costume and set-design;

• From Redcoats To Rococo Madness—Costuming ‘The Artful Dodger’ - Marion Boyce, the costume designer behind the fabulous Phryne Fisher, on joining the series’ second season and creating gorgeous costumes for mad character capers.

• Lauren Richard - Set Decorator

• The Royal Hospital

All of this matters … as the Arts in Australia is currently staring down decimation (again; Government gutting, under-funding and interference) it’s vitally important that we can all see the best of us on display to keep our art and culture alive and even thriving;

• Shrinking casts, diminished reach, less ambition: the arts in Australia needs more than just tax reform - The real goal of arts policy shouldn’t be to keep organisations solvent – it needs to keep each artform alive for the next generation, writes Belvoir St theatre’s artistic director

• Creative arts enrolments fall as policies begin to bite

• The desertification of Australian culture - How the diminishing government support for the arts is taking its toll.

The love and support for a show like The Artful Dodger goes far beyond just joining the JackxBelle ship - it’s a relief and a wonder to feel such elation and support for a thoroughly Aussie show, that has taken a piece of great and popular English literature, and treated it with care and curiosity to tell a decidedly Australian tale at a time when we’re seeing less and less of ourselves on-screen.

As Australian Writers Guild chief executive, Claire Pullen said at the closure of Matchbox;

“Its closure is a sad reminder that our industry can’t rely on the whims of international studios to keep us afloat, and that we must be looking at solutions to maintain a robust and distinctly Australian screen sector … We have the talent within Australia to create internationally renowned drama, so it’s vital we nurture that at home.”

If you haven’t yet watched The Artful Dodger, may I humbly implore you to do so?! It’s a great one for teens and families alike, a wonderfully binge-able and clever series that has a beating-heart romance at its centre and fantastically rich characters extended beyond their fates on the pages of Charles Dicken’s famous novel.

Speaking of the original creator; I think he would have been tickled with this reimagining of Dodger and Fagin, since he himself was somewhat fascinated with the prospect of Australia … you have to wonder if he was doing Jack a favour by sending him here (it has certainly worked out well for us, the audience);

• A distant paradise for Dickens Books - Charles Dickens saw Australia as a utopia for the working class — and his wayward sons.

The Book

Let’s clear something up from the jump; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is not a “romance” - it is “Gothic romance,” but those are two vastly different genres … romance is uplifting, and focuses on an emotional journey with a happy ending. Gothic romance leans into dark, suspenseful elements in a narrative and does not end in happiness.

So I’ll admit; the second Emerald Fennell’s adaptation was announced and called “the greatest romance of all time,” with a Valentine’s Day release - I was worried.

But let’s be honest. Alarm-bells were ringing long before that with the casting of Jacob Elordi as Heathcliff.

To be clear; it is indeed most likely that Heathcliff in the novel is intended to be Black, or at least mixed-race. Mr. Earnshaw finds him on the streets of Liverpool, and given that was the hub of the British slave trade at the time the novel is set (roughly 1771 to 1802) the inference is that he’s a product of the transatlantic slave trade.

As per Wikipedia;

Heathcliff is first described as a “dark-skinned gipsy” in appearance with “black eyes”, as well as later being said to be “as white as the wall behind him”  and “pale...with an expression of mortal hate.” Mr Linton, the Earnshaws’ neighbour, suggests that he might be “a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”.

And so … the Film was somewhat doomed as an honest adaptation, from the start.

Thus far only one Wuthering Heights adaptation from 2011 has cast Heathcliff book-accurate - directed by Andrea Arnold, and featuring Kaya Scodelario as Cathy and James Howson as Heathcliff, and even this film is not without controversy and cannot be fully celebrated, sadly;

• Dubbed: the actors who lost their voices. Wuthering Heights star James Howson had his voice overdubbed in the film, it has emerged. He joins a surprisingly well-known group of actors...

On first seeing the film, Howson noted with dismay that his performance had been dubbed. “I felt really hurt,” he said this week. “All the things I had to do in the film – the cold mornings, the difficult scenes – and then they use someone else’s voice.”

Which is why it would have been nice to get a more accurate adaptation that could be fully embraced … instead we get, this.

The (new) Film

I am sorry to say, but the red-flags were not just ornamental set-dressing where this film is concerned … it was indeed a case of Wuthering Whites with a Cathy and Heathcliff from Queensland;

I went with a friend who has not read Emily Brontë, never seen an Emerald Fennell film, and doesn’t get the Elordi hype.

Verdict?

“No,” from both of us, and; “it’s like an olden times Tell Me Lies,” from her in which everyone is awful and you end up rooting for everyone to cark it.

My gripe - as someone who has simply enjoyed Emily Brontë’s only novel, and isn’t even a puritanical mega-fan - is that is strayed too far from the source material, to almost feel like you’re in an AI hellscape of SparkNotes meets SoBrief. Like we’ve been subjected to Emerald Fennell’s attempt at Drunk History but it’s Drunk Literary with an $80-million budget.

There are too many changes to list, but off the top of my head;

• No Hindley Earnshaw, Cathy’s brother and Heathcliff’s tormentor is erased entirely - alluded to as dead in infancy instead

• Mr. Earnshaw - kind-hearted in the novel - has taken on Hindley’s cruel traits, and is bizarrely awful

• Ellen “Nelly” Dean’s background altered and given a baffling villain edit that is doubly dubious as she’s played by one of only two diverse actors; Vietnamese American actor Hong Chau

• The second-half of the novel is not really touched on (no ghost, dammit!), but weirdly patch-worked haphazardly

• Lots and lots of sex, where there was yearning, and tragic, unrequited love in the novel … it’s not even really interesting or overly freaky sex, just limpet tongue-work mostly, and random camera-angles of snails and aspic meant to titillate but you mostly go; “huh?” and “ew.”

It’s all very odd and disjointed - so far from a faithful adaptation that mere quotation marks around the title - making it “Wuthering Heights” - seems insufficient. I can’t think why Fennell didn’t merely take its inspiration - and that of Romeo & Juliet that she also alludes to, subtly, with a sledgehammer - and make something entirely new and historical. Yes, it is more akin to FanFiction and possibly another bullet loaded in the chamber of the Anti-Intellectualism and BookTok debate, since it does have the bizarre feel of a film trying to appeal to the “Books as Accessories,” crowd.

Saucy Success

Regardless, the film is a success - which is on the one hand is kinda nice, for a period-drama based on a classic novel? But according to the Hollywood Reporter, it’s not tracking as well as predicted - and it’s partly due to bad word-of-mouth and poor reviews;

• Box Office: ‘Wuthering Heights’ Faces Unexpected Trouble, Needs Strong Valentine’s Day Bump - While still set to win the weekend, the edgy movie adaptation of the iconic novel starring Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi is at risk of coming in notably behind expectations after getting slapped with a B CinemaScore from audiences and seeing its critics score diminish day by day.

Rival studios, however, show the female-skewing film coming in between $33 million and $35 million for the four days after posting a Friday opening gross of $13.3 million, including $3 million in previews. While that should be more than enough to top the holiday chart, it falls well short of tracking, which had Wuthering Heights earning closer to $50 million heading into the weekend in North America. (Warners fought this narrative from the beginning). One distribution source elsewhere notes that while presales were strong, walk-up business is a problem.

Hollywood Reporter notes part of the decline is no doubt due to poor early reviews and fan-scores (eh, it has a not-so-bad Rotten Tomatoes 63% as of Feb 15)

• The Independent - Wuthering Heights review – Emerald Fennell’s astonishingly bad adaptation is like a limp Mills & Boon

• The Guardian - Wuthering Heights review – too hot, too greedy adaptation guarantees bad dreams in the night

• Big Issue - Swooning over Heathcliff? Let’s not forget, he’s a really terrible landlord

Classless

For a moment, let’s do as Fennell and forget the added layer of racism to Wuthering Heights (I know, I’m sorry!) - and examine how it is also about class, exploring the rigidity of Victorian class structures and how Heathcliff is an outsider, intent on disrupting the social hierarchy.

For this reason, I’m not that surprised it has become another Emerald Fennell theme-flop film in which she tries to tackle class-consciousness but probably can’t because she’s too rich and privileged to understand it.

The same thing happened in Saltburn, frankly - where Fennell thought she was skewering the upper-class but really just came away demonising aspirational middle-class, and erased the poor entirely; ‘Saltburn’s’ Critics Are Right — the Film Is Gorgeous, but It Whitewashes the Ugliness of the Upper Classes

This became the main topic of criticism against that film, and rightly so - and the same criticisms could very well be applied to her portrayal of Heathcliff here again (especially since, without the second-half of the novel, he hasn’t fully earned his villainy in the movie);

• ‘It could be an advert for Oxford’: what does Saltburn say about class and privilege in the UK?

In truth, I don’t know what the point of Saltburn is, other than to make in-jokes about how middle-class people don’t know how to behave in country houses, jokes that feel a little unkind when you consider Fennell’s own privileged background and upbringing. Emerald Fennell is an Oxford University English literature graduate, so she’ll understand the reference I’m about to make: in Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satirical essay A Modest Proposal, Swift suggests that the Irish poor sell their babies to be cooked and eaten by wealthy ladies and gentlemen as a way of ameliorating their economic situation. It’s appalling, but there’s a deeper meaning: Swift uses satire to underscore the heartlessness of British policy towards the Irish. But without a purpose, satire is just pointless provocation.

• Saltburn: Can posh people write good class satire? Emerald Fennell’s second film was billed as the British entry into the ‘eat the rich’ genre – but it fails to truly criticise the elite, argues Patrick Sproull

I honestly don’t quite understand how Emerald Fennell sees herself … I think her debut film Promising Young Woman was incredible, partly because - whether she experienced it personally, or tangentially - it’s about sexual assault and rape, cloaked in dark humour, adrenaline, and female rage which felt intimately explored with nuance. Also that it prioritises female friendship, over romance which was - I thought - a further strength.

I don’t really know when Fennell decided that “class struggle” was also in her tool-kit, and I’ve often wondered if she self-identifies with Barry Keoghan’s character Oliver Quick from Saltburn - who is evilly middle-class? I think Fennell kinda gets it? (even casting Keoghan - a working-class actor from a genuinely impoverished background - shows she has some semblance of understanding ~in theory~ of these topics, I guess?) but I wish someone would pull her aside and tell her to concentrate on Female Rage more than Class Struggle in her future works, because that’s where her lived-experience elevates her art.

Wuthering Wealth

I think Fennell’s struggle with class-struggle is further highlighted by the sheer commercial brand crossover of the film. And that could even be applied to the casting of Robbie and Elordi - who feel very “billable actor,” but not exactly book-accurate.

I don’t know if this is a Margot-Robbie-as-producer thing? (the Barbie movie set a new modern-day standard for cross-promotion in cinema, certainly) and if this is how they partly funded the movie (it had an $80-million USD budget, and went all-out on things like detailed, purpose-built sets) … if so, I guess that’s just the hustle nowadays?

But some of the brand-collabs seem to lean into Emerald Fennell’s persona as someone known to be a bit of a “posh” director from privileged, upper-class background too - which is why I assume something like the Hunter X “WUTHERING HEIGHTS” brand-collab exists? Sure, as they say; ‘Shop timeless silhouettes and heritage outerwear inspired by the rolling hills of the North Yorkshire Moors that are as classic as the “Wuthering Heights” story itself.’ I mean … I guess? But when I think of Hunter waterproof boots, it’s of Kate Moss sporting them at Glastonbury, or Kate Middleton wearing them to watch polo. Very much the Eton/Turnip Toffs crowd, which is where I also imagine Fennell exists.

• 11 Wuthering Heights Collaborations That Are Obsession-Worthy

• “Wuthering Heights” x Last Crumb

Yes, I guess it’s hard to insert brand-deals into a period drama so now the collabs happen around the film?

But as I watched, I couldn’t help but feel like the movie was just a conduit for brand-deals … No one involved seems overly concerned with doing justice to Emily Brontë’s book, it all just feels like a Machiavellian vehicle for consumerism and capitalism. An empty-headed and hard-hearted bodice-ripper for the sake of selling Hunter wellies and Crumble cookies on Valentine’s Day.

The Good

I don’t want to pretend the film was all slog no substance (I mean, it mostly was) but the costumes by Jacqueline Durran really were wonderful; vibe-y and extravagant, to make up for the whole film not being period-accurate (seemingly as per Fennell’s wishes). For how distinctive the costumes and sets looked, it made me wish that Fennell had penned an original work - to have written something that met the moment of random pearlized tricot, and a room made out of Margot Robbie’s skin.

Because those sets were luscious -by production designer Suzie Davies - they reminded me more than anything, of the 2014 French film Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête) but that being fantasy, the look made a lot more sense than it did in this film set in Yorkshire … Still, I think Aussie reviewer aichark had some good points and pick-ups.

The Soundtrack

I really, really, really loved the soundtrack to the film. Both Charli XCX’s songs, which I think Rolling Stone did a banger review on;

• Rolling Stone - Charli XCX’s ‘Wuthering Heights’ Album Is a Brat-Goth Banger -Written for Emerald Fennell’s new film, it’s a fully realized LP that adds another wrinkle to Charli’s always-evolving sensibility

But I especially loved the inclusion of folk singer, Olivia Chaney;

• The voice behind Cathy and Heathcliff’s song in Wuthering Heights

I think the music and soundtrack were inspired and haunting, Chaney’s rendition of “The Dark Eyed Sailor” was particularly brilliant and I feel like if a movie could be carried on soundtrack, it’d be a slam-dunk.

Sadly, we have to reconcile with the whole sorry slop.

I’d give it a solid 1.5/2 out of 5 (and that’s mostly me throwing a bone to the music, Durran and Davies) - everything else you can keep and cast out to the Moors.

Brontë deserves better. We all do.

It is that political, I’m afraid

In terrible News for the “it’s not that deep,” and “I’m not that into politics,” crowd - an author on the Internet made a good point about press freedom, resisting billionaire oligarchy, and the queer Canadian juggernaut TV series; Heated Rivalry.

She’s right.

And the article in question was by Rachel Kurzius, from 2023;

• Hockey romance novels are in the news. Here’s why they’re so popular.

The Power of Ice-Hockey Romances

Now, Kurzius didn’t “discover” ice-hockey romance as a sub-genre. She was reporting on the popularity of it within romance books space - and citing titles that had been around for 7+ years in some cases;

• The Deal by Elle Kennedy (first self-published 2015)

• Game Changer by Rachel Reid (first published 2018)

• Icebreaker by Hannah Grace (first published 2022)

• The Year we Fell Down by Sarina Bowen (first published 2014)

• Pucking Around by Emily Rath (first published 2023)

What had actually partly sparked Kurzius’ article, was the ways that online book communities were - sometimes disturbingly - bleeding into real life, and imitating art a little too intensely.

One TikToker in particular - Kierra Lewis - took things too far when her newfound love of ice-hockey romance fiction bled into a strange obsession with one real-life ice-hockey player; Alex Wennberg.

I have never been an ice-hockey romance fan. My preferred sports-romance was generally baseball. So I was on the periphery of all this happening at the time (and I wasn’t on TikTok in 2023) but YouTuber ‘Swell Entertainment’ has a great break-down;

• Krakens, booktok, and you

Which boils down to … BookTok had crossed a line in hyper-sexualising players. Poorly handled by the Seattle Kraken’s team at the time who didn’t do enough to protect their players and acknowledge their discomfort with the fandom communities forming;

• Kraken remove BookTok content after Alex Wennberg controversy

• NHL player’s wife alleges BookTok group ‘crossed a line’ after building a fandom around her husband: ‘It actually sounds pretty predatory’

This was all big News at the time, but some people were quite stumped as to what “ice-hockey romance” even was … enter Rachel Kurzius and her August 2023 article for the Washington Post;

Amidst all this, Kurzius’ article left a real impression on Canadian actor and director, Jacob Tierney who read the article and then went and read Rachel Reid’s books, becoming an instant fan as he told Evan Ross Katz;

Oh, I loved it. I approached this material as a fan. And quite honestly, I did not think initially that I was going to adapt the books. I wasn’t sure this story was adaptable. The book is pure, unabashed smut. If you think the show is smutty, go read the book. But I loved it because I loved Shane and Ilya. And Rachel’s an amazing writer. Her books are funny, they’re smart, she knows hockey. So I slid into her DMs.

The first episode of Heated Rivalry dropped in November 2025 and became an instant phenomena hit; putting ice-hockey, Canadian television, and romance novels firmly in the spotlight;

• How My Book, Heated Rivalry, Became A TV Phenomenon - A gay hockey romance novel could’ve been a hard sell. Instead, it caught fire.

• Inside ‘Heated Rivalry,’ the Gay Hockey Romance Series Changing Queer TV - The stars and creator of Heated Rivalry tell all about bringing the queer novel to life on TV.

• Why the Heated Rivalry TV series understands gay men better than the book

You know things have become a ridiculous level of popular when there’s talk of not only more books in the series, but a Musical in the works!;

• A Heated Rivalry Musical is Headed Off-Broadway - No one works faster than a parody writer with a dream.

• ‘Heated Rivalry’ Author Confirms A Third Ilya And Shane Book Is On Its Way

And maybe most heartening is what a life-changer this success has been for author Rachel Reid, in innumerable ways;

• Heated Rivalry author says TV success led to help with her Parkinson’s

• She Put the Heat in ‘Heated Rivalry’ Thanks to a steamy television adaptation, Rachel Reid’s romance novels about closeted hockey players have become mainstream best-sellers.

That New York Times article hits on something important with Reid’s sudden success … mostly that it was more of a slow, slow-burn;

While “Heated Rivalry” was released in 2019, it took nearly a year to gain traction. Then the romance novelist Cat Sebastian, one of Reid’s favorite writers, recommended it on social media. “That was a real turning point,” Reid said. Readers began to discover her work. Each subsequent release reached a slightly larger audience, and in 2023 “The Long Game,” the sixth book in the series, which continues Shane and Ilya’s story, made the USA Today best-seller list.

Reid’s success hinging on a fellow romance author hyping her books to her own reader community, and Rachel Kurzius putting the spotlight on the series is pretty indicative of how most books publicity works nowadays - on a wing and a prayer, and grassroots communities who nurture by being dedicated and savvy fans who know these books deserve more critical engagement than a lot of mainstream media is willing to give.

Kurzius has been running down Heated Rivalry stories for the Washington Post for a while now, and smartly so - since this fandom is not cooling down any time soon, and it is having far-reaching economic effects;

• Heated Rivalry: How investment in Canadian content can pay off at home and abroad

WaPo Books Desk is No More

But Kurzius has just had a huge blow to her pop-culture reporting - “The Woodward and Bernstein of hockey romance,” per NPR - has just been fired from The Washington Post in a massive culling by owner Jeff Bezos;

• Washington Post Lays Off More Than 300 Journalists

• ‘Bloodbath’ at Washington Post as massive layoffs announced

• Is Jeff Bezos Selling Out the Washington Post? How the paper that brought down Richard Nixon is struggling to survive the second term of Donald Trump.

• ‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of workers - Former Post executive editor blasts owner Jeff Bezos’s ‘sickening efforts to curry favor’ with Trump

Kurzius’ entire department - the books desk - has been severed from the paper;

The Post is also restructuring its local coverage, reducing its international reporting operation, cutting its books desk and suspending its flagship daily news podcast Post Reports.

Media Barons and Your Pop-Culture

Nobody should be surprised however, that this is the route Bezos is taking … he purchased the 148-year-old newspaper in 2013 for $250-million, as reported by Hanna Rosin for The Atlantic, How Jeff Bezos Broke The Washington Post;

In 2013 Bezos purchased the paper for $250 million from the Graham family and promised a “golden era” to come.

In a conversation with Joshua Benton, the founder of and a senior writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University, Rosin and Benton touch on Bezos’s change of heart that was always bound to happen with the rise of Trump’s fascist America;

Benton: We saw a confluence of events in the fall of 2024 around President Trump’s second election that I think were very telling. You had, in October, Bezos making a decision on behalf of the newspaper to stop endorsing candidates for president at a time that the newspaper would have certainly been expected to—and the editorial board of the newspaper had desired to—endorse Kamala Harris. Bezos put out a statement saying that actually it’s an awful idea for a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate, because it creates the perception of bias. And we need to have a newspaper that doesn’t sully itself with a presidential endorsement.

They go on to cite the incredible fallout of democracy dying, as reporters in the field were alerted to their redundancy, Lizzie Johnson while she was on the ground in Ukraine;

But; this is what billionaires do. Because we’ve allowed them to;

• Ultra-rich media owners are tightening their grip on democracy. It’s time to wrest our power back

• The seven richest billionaires are all media barons

“The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan in 1964 - if you want to control the message, you take control of the medium. Like, a newspaper with 130,000 print subscribers and 2.5 million digital subscribers.

So if Bezos is cutting the Washington Post books department - that has been proven to have considerable pop-culture influence on the current media landscape, certainly - what kind of media can we expect from these oligarchies …? And will it satiate the ice-hockey romance crowd, or anyone who enjoys diversified media?

Um.

No.

You can have a flop documentary about the First Lady that’s a thinly-veiled bribe and money-laundering project;

• Melania’s $40m Amazon deal: another sign Bezos is capitulating to Donald Trump

Or a revived, early-00s comedy franchise with a Director creep credibly accused of sexual harassment and misconduct at the helm;

• Trump Flexes His Power to Bring Back Brett Ratner and the ‘Rush Hour’ Franchise - ‘Rush Hour 4’ is in the works at Paramount after Trump lobbied supporter and major studio shareholder Larry Ellison to take on the sequel

Oh, can we also interest you in a News media landscape injected with pro-Israel bias?

• The billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in Israel’s favor - Having acquired Paramount and CBS and eyeing TikTok and CNN, the Ellisons are constructing a pro-Israel information empire with unprecedented reach.

• Hollywood Was Happily Ignoring Bari Weiss—Until David Ellison Installed Her at CBS - As David Simon puts it, “Murrow and Cronkite have both interrupted their peaceful mouldering, and are now revolving at such speeds that never mind the affront to televised journalism—we need to consider the geologic risks to us all.”

McCarthyism

Australia is by no means immune from fascistic, McCarthyist flattening of our art for “social cohesion” either, which becomes thinly-veiled code for “anything that allows Palestinians to speak, or criticises Israel,”;

• NSW government contacts Newcastle Writers Festival about author Randa Abdel-Fattah’s inclusion

Arts Minister John Graham told parliament the government’s priority was social cohesion in the wake of the Bondi terror attack. “The last advice to me in relation to the Newcastle Writers Festival is they’re yet to publicly announce their program,” Mr Graham told parliament.

• Sydney Biennale’s olive branch amid anti-Zionist claims

The peace offering follows a campaign by some in the Jewish community and their supporters warning the festival – due to open on March 14 and curated by Emirati royal Hoor Al Qasimi – is a potential threat to social cohesion.

Even Giridharan Sivaraman - Australia’s race discrimination commissioner - has said to be wary of “social cohesion” as a catch-all term, Australia is going backwards on race but ‘social cohesion’ is not the answer, commissioner warns;

“It’s just a buzzword,” he says. “We need to be able to get along but part of that is having difficult conversations sometimes, and we don’t. We shouldn’t get along at the expense of pretending racism doesn’t exist, and that’s the key.”

• Racism watchdog warns of coded message in cohesion call

“The irony is, by calling out the need for social cohesion, you are not talking about racism, and you undermine your progress towards a harmonious society,” Mr Sivaraman told AAP. “Sometimes social cohesion has been used as a means of causing racism in the sense that it’s been code for assimilation and for people shedding parts of their identities when they don’t fit within what is seen as acceptable in Australia. “I’ve had people say to me, ‘don’t talk about racism, because you’re disrupting the social cohesion’, so it actually stops you from being able to talk about the problem, because talking about the problem is seen as disruptive.”

Now is not the time to allow pandering politicians, and billionaire media barons to run rampant over our art - not in Australia, and not in any Democracy that values a Free Press and Freedom of Speech.

Get to Work

Or, as Toni Morrison said;

There is too much on the line. Yes, Democracy but also - hot queer ice-hockey romances, frankly.

I’m back with a Recommendations Post, after I so enjoyed jotting down my favourite “Romantasy” reads in November, and because in my ‘Overconsumption and Consumerism in Books’ post, I mentioned how Historical Romance has been hit particularly hard by the prevalence for more expensive book-formats, and the end of mass market paperbacks;

• Publishers Plan for a New Mass Market Paperback Winnowing

• An Elegy for the Duke: Are Reports of the Demise of Historical Romance Exaggerated?

And - heck! - even authors who have really helped grow the Historical Romance audience, want to keep bringing in new readers;

• Julia Quinn Wants to Give Historical Romance a Boost

So I thought to combine those two pathways and give an account of some of my all-time favourite His-Rom (Historical Romance) reads, ALSO because … BookTok lately, has been recommending this most excellent Romance sub-genre for readers disgruntled and disillusioned by the poor quality of Romantasy, lately.

I’ve had countless videos like the one below (from baskinsuns) cross my feed, as the Romance-voracious enter into new sub-genres or backlist books to feed their appetites and higher-expectations;

I even contributed my own TikTok, pitching one of my favourite authors - Beverly Jenkins - for those new to His-Rom reading.

But here are my other recs;

Historical Romance Faves

• Wicked and the Wallflower by Sarah MacLean – the first book in the Bareknuckle Bastards series by one of the very best his-rom authors. The “bareknuckle bastards,” in question are the bastard sons of a duke, who have become the kings of London’s dark streets, and the spinster women who crash into their lives. Honestly, all of MacLean’s series are brilliant and I recommend them all but I really enjoyed that this was a historical-romance series about outcasts and not upper-echelons of London society.

• The Many Sins of Lord Cameron by Jennifer Ashley – third book in the Mackenzies & McBrides series, and I will say generally it’s book one The Madness of Lord Ian Mackenzie which features an autistic male protagonist (not that he’s labeled as such in 1881) that gets lots of (deserved) hype, but I also love Cameron Mackenzie because he’s a widower and his love interest is a spy for the Queen - the two of them together are dynamite.

• The Secret Diaries of Miss Miranda Cheever by Julia Quinn - yes, this is Julia Quinn of Bridgerton fame and that’s a fine place to start in historical’s but I was never a huge fan. I’ve tended to prefer Quinn’s lesser-known novels, chief amongst them being Miranda Cheever which is about a woman pining after her best friend’s older brother and is so sexy and tragic and lovely. I am also a bigger fan of Two Dukes of Wyndham series from her.

• Passion by Lisa Valdez - the first book in a supposed Passion Quartet that I even hesitate to recommend, because … *deep sigh* this first book is honestly amazing and it came out in 2005. Second book Patience came out in 2010 (an unusual wait between books, and the sequel was “meh”) but the third book Primrose has yet to be released (though it’s had a Goodreads account since 2010). Valdez out here being the George RR Martin of his-rom is frustrating because judging by Passion she could have been *great*.

• Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare - honestly, one of the best to ever do it is Tessa Dare. This book is about a young woman and her older brother’s best friend who has agreed to help her before she enters the marriage-mart … I love and adore Tessa Dare, and have devoured everything she’s written. Unfortunately, she’s been very open about battling a rare disease called idiopathic subglottic stenosis, that’s forced her to slow down and as fans we’re very supportive of her need to put health first. But I love that I get to recommend her to potential newbies, her backlist is brilliant to delve into!

• Seven Brides for Beau McBride by Amy Barry - this is Book #3 of The McBrides of Montana series that I am *obsessed* with, it’s legit one of my favourite new his-rom series and this book in particular uses one of my favourite story-tropes; Cyrano de Bergerac. Amy Barry is Australian (also writes as Amy Matthews for more women’s fiction titles) and I just think she’s one of our most talented in the romance space.

• Love in the Afternoon by Lisa Kleypas - So Lisa Kleypas is my HANDS. DOWN. favourite historical-romance author. Hands down. I have read everything and she is the greatest of all time (GOAT) for me. Love in the Afternoon is from her The Hathaways series, #5 book and I love this one best of all because it’s another Cyrano trope!; in which a nature-obsessed young woman agrees to write letters to a soldier on behalf of her best friend, but is totally unprepared for the feelings she develops on the page. It is 10/10!

• Ruthless by Anne Stuart - this is a Georgian-set version of BDSM and more erotic historical-romance, so if his-rom seems too staid and ho-hum to you, give Anne Stuart’s darker and more overt stories a try.

• Flowers from the Storm by Laura Kinsale - this is maybe one of the most talked-about and famous his-rom novels out there, and for good reason. It’s a revelatory reading experience that is very gothic romance (minus the full tragedy) - about a rake who is caught out by his married-lover’s husband and suffers a stroke in the middle of the confrontation … he has partial-paralysis and more side-effects, but as dictated by the time-period he’s simply labeled “mad” and shunned by society - and it’s not until a quaker woman called Maddy comes to nurse him, that he’s treated as a whole person once again. I’d say this is a pretty great beginner his-rom, because it takes familiar tropes of gothic romance and eventually kneads them into more modern romance plot …

• The Duke Who Didn’t by Courtney Milan - another of the *best* in the game, and her backlist is fire. She is really interesting too, for having been traditionally-published first, and then she chose to go off on her own and be self-published when she got pushback from her former publishing house, for wanting to write ahistorical, diverse romances - Courtney Milan Has a Burning Desire to Make the Romance Genre More Diverse - this was before Bridgerton open-casting mind, and gives some indication of how ahead-of-the-curve Milan is.

• Devil In Spring by Lisa Kleypas - another fave from my fave, third book in The Ravenels series about a woman trying to build her board-game empire (lol, go with me - Kleypas has this knack for finding little historical fascinations and using them to great effect for her characters). Now, let me say, Kleypas has been MIA from publishing since 2021 … BUT, WAIT! In January this year hyper-vigilant fans who have alerts out on her name (ahem, that’s me) found a pre-order page for a new book of hers, coming in October - Queen of Lombard Street - which similar to the historical factoid of the first female board-game creator, is going to be about England’s first female banker!

• The Rogue of Fifth Avenue by Joanna Shupe - the first book in a series that spins around the specific New York location of Fifth Avenue in the Victorian era, and puts a spotlight on middle-classes at this time too. Shupe is a fairly new-to-me author and I’ve loved every one of her books so far.

• Forbidden by Beverly Jenkins - another one whose backlist (and she was first published in 1994, so she’s been going strong for decades!) is just legendary, and you could start anywhere and fall in love. If you want to know more about how Jenkins takes certain historic time-periods (like, the Civil War) and writes empowered and romantic Black romances, she features in the Love Between the Covers and it’s so fascinating to hear how much she’s shaped the modern readership of historical romance.

• A Courtesan’s Guide to Getting Your Man by Celeste Bradley and Susan Donovan - a historical-romance that is both romantic, and doesn’t look down on sex-work (which is kinda a big deal in his-rom) about how a renowned Courtesan got to her lofty positions.

• Scandalous Desires by Elizabeth Hoyt - No. 3 in the Maiden Lanes series, and this book is about a widowed woman and London river pirate. AHHHHH, it’s so good. It’s like, hot Dickensian.

• The Highlander by Kerrigan Byrne - another third book, this time in the Victorian Rebels series about a Laird and English governess who fall in love. This one is HOT!

Queer his-rom Faves

I do just one to say; if you think that given the time-periods in which they’re set, that his-rom is all heteronormative and not a place for queer readers to play … oh, no. No sweetie. Queer people have always existed at all points in time, and we always will - these are just *some* books that reflect that.

Some of these are YA, and I’ve included them because they’re still among the best in the sub-genre. And I’ve opted for older time-periods to match my previous recs (otherwise I’d also totally suggest picking up Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, or All Out: The No-Longer-Secret Stories Of Queer Teens Throughout The Ages);

• Gwen and Art Are Not in Love and Not for the Faint of Heart by Lex Croucher - AHHHHH, Croucher is one of my faves writing right now. From Arthurian queerness, to a sapphic Robin Hood retelling; they’re one of the most dynamic and fun queer writers in YA historical-romance spaces, and I guarantee anything you pick up from Croucher will be a crowd-pleaser.

• The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue and The Lady’s Guide to Petticoats and Piracy by Mackenzi Lee - young bisexuals on a Grand Tour of Europe in an 18th-century romantic adventure. Need I say more?

• Earl Crush and Ladies in Hating by Alexandra Vasti - she is the newest-to-me historical romance author, and I’ve been tickled by everything I’ve read! Not always outright queer, but with diverse characters who are often bisexual and openly so, or at least curious and accepting! This feels very fresh and I’ve now marked her down as an auto-buy author for me.

• Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith by Sarah Waters - if you needed further proof that of course there’s always been queer novels in historical-romance, Sarah Waters. Hey, this is someone who has Booker Prize giving guides to her novels but while they’re not firmly and 100% in the more commercial his-rom sub-genre, I am telling you; nobody does yearning better.

• The Witchstone By Henry H. Neff

I heard about this book because it was shortlisted for one of my favourite US books awards; The Alex Awards, which are hosted by the Young Adult Library Services Association.

The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18. The winning titles are selected from the previous year’s publishing.

The Alex Awards are often where I find some great reads that are a little off-the-beaten-track, and that was definitely The Witchstone for me (which I’d not seen anywhere else, until its shortlisting there);

An unforgettable, high-stakes, laugh-out-loud funny novel, The Witchstone blends the merciless humor of The Good Place with the madcap fantasy of Terry Pratchett.

Meet Laszlo, eight-hundred-year-old demon and Hell’s least productive Curse Keeper. From his office beneath Midtown, he oversees the Drakeford Curse, which involves a pathetic family upstate and a mysterious black monolith. It’s a sexy enough assignment-colonial origins, mutating victims, et cetera-but Laszlo has no interest in maximizing the curse’s potential; he’d rather sunbathe in Ibiza, quaff martinis, and hustle the hustlers on Manhattan’s subway. Unfortunately, his division has new management, and Laszlo’s ratings are so abysmal that he’s given six days to shape up or he’ll be melted down and returned to the Primordial Ooze.

Meet Maggie Drakeford, nineteen-year-old Curse Bearer. All she’s ever known is the dreary corner of the Catskills where the Drakeford Curse has devoured her father’s humanity and is rapidly laying claim to her own. The future looks hopeless, until Laszlo appears at the Drakeford farmhouse one October night and informs them that they have six days-and six days only-to break the spell before it becomes permanent. Can Maggie trust the glib and handsome Laszlo? Of course not. But she also can’t pass up an opportunity to save her family, even if it means having a demon as a guide …

Thus begins a breakneck international adventure that takes our unlikely duo from a hot dog stand in Central Park to the mountains of Liechtenstein. As the clock ticks down, tough-as-nails Maggie and conniving Laszlo will uncover a secret so profound that what began as a farcical quest to break a curse will eventually threaten the very Lords of Hell.

I absolutely *inhaled* this book - I think The Good Place is a good bit of pop-culture similarity, but I’d also note it reminded me of TV show Evil and movie The Cabin in the Woods. All of which is a kind of trifecta of my interests and pop-culture faves, so this book delighted me! It’s a supernatural-horror-comedy; if that’s a thing?

AND, after I finished reading I went searching the author’s socials and finally got confirmation that a sequel is in the works! YESSSSS!

Watching

• The Bikeriders 2023 movie

In September last year, I had Influenza-A and was bed-bound for a solid 3-days (but thanks to nasal-flushes and electrolytes and having had my flu-shot, I got over it after that) but I watched a lot of TV in that time. Nothing really stuck with me, and I watched it all between-napping (I vaguely remember liking that rom-com The Wrong Paris but don’t hold me to it because it took my about 5-watches because I kept falling asleep). What I did surprisingly love and keep thinking about, is the 2023 movie The Bikeriders.

It’s based on a photographic series by Danny Lyon, that gives insight into American bike culture of the 1960s. The film though, is about a particular subject that Lyons met intermittently from 1965 to 1967, and the years he rode with the Chicago Outlaws club;

After a chance encounter, headstrong Kathy is drawn to Benny, member of Midwestern motorcycle club the Vandals. As the club transforms into a dangerous underworld of violence, Benny must choose between Kathy and his loyalty to the club.

I mostly watched the movie because it has one of my favourite actors in it - Jodie Comer (doing another phenomenal accent!) - but it really blew me away for what a character study it was. Insight into a bygone era and showing the precipice of change that came between the 60s and 70s (the Vietnam War really changed the culture of bike gangs in particular; who joined them, what kind of trauma and drug-use in particular they started to bring). I loved that this movie was framed through Comer’s character - Kathy - she is the record-keeper, and reminds us how much women were involved in keeping these guys … not “in line” but holding them to a higher standard at times, and the mothering they did.

I was a really big fan of the Sons of Anarchy TV series, and The Bikeriders felt like a prequel to that world. I also loved discovering Lyon’s photographic series afterwards;

Listening

• The Walkers: The real Salt Path

Raynor Winn’s memoir The Salt Path was a bestseller and literary phenomenon with millions of people captivated by this true story of financial ruin, terminal illness, and healing through nature. Raynor Winn has since published two more books and The Salt Path has been adapted for the big screen, starring Jason Isaacs and Gillian Anderson. At its heart it is a simple tale, of a couple embarking on a 630 mile trek in the face of stark adversity. When faced with nothing, they chose to walk. Then Chloe Hadjimatheou received a tip-off that the memoir may not be the “unflinchingly honest” account it claimed to be. And it led her to ask: how far can you bend the truth before it begins to break?

This podcast began with Chloe Hadjimatheou’s original investigative piece;

• How I discovered The Real Salt Path from my investigation into Raynor Winn’s hit memoir – and it started on Instagram

But the podcast has gone even further into the initial investigation and it’s an absolute doozy! Highly, highly recommend - but it will raise your blood pressure, guaranteed!

Wearing

• Virgin Cold-Pressed Hemp Seed Oil

This is going to be one of those recommendations that’s not fancy or cute, but practical and *works* - so; I have a mild case of scalp psoriasis that started earlier this year when I also had contact-psoriasis (allergy to a particular brand of spray deodorant) on my chest and back which I managed to get under control (mostly with Dermal anti-itch soothing cream)

Scalp though, is a little trickier and nothing was really working for me (Dermal’s scalp relief serum would give immediate relief, but wasn’t doing anything to clear it up in the long-term) so I turned to TikTok (I know, don’t shame me!) and I actually found a treatment that works; Hemp seed oil!

I don’t heat mine up, I find it quite soothing to put on a little cool in the bottle. I got the scalp bottle from Kmart combined with pure *cold-pressed* hemp seed oil from an Aussie brand called ‘Green Hemp’;

• 177ml OXX Haircare Hair Oil Applicator Tool

• A Pure Hemp Seed Oil

• OXX Haircare Satin Hair Bonnet

I go the 500ML bottle of hemp seed, and a cheap satin bonnet because I either sleep in it (also with a towel down on my pillow) or I wear it all day to let the hemp seed oil do its thing. And it works - to stop the itching, and actually clear up the psoriasis too. When it was bad I was applying once a week, but now maybe I’m once a month?

I also just love this brand, every time I buy the oil from them I try another product and I can report back positively about;

• A Glow Balm 100 ml (I use this on my face/chest, and I love it!)

• A Soap Box 6 pack Pick your pack (I use a bar of soap inside a natural cotton soap-saver bag, as my first all-over wash and *then* I go in with a pump bottle of body wash and a silicone scrubber - I am currently obsessed with Lush shower gels, Snow Fairy Milkshake especially. But I am always looking for good quality bars of soap, and these are fab - lemongrass is my favourite!)

So there you go; not a fancy recommendation, but a very practical one for me fellow sensitive-skin gang.

Going

• Waitress the Musical is coming to Australia!

I have said in another Substack that though I’ve never seen this musical live, the soundtrack is one of my favourites. It was going to be performed Australia-wide in 2020, but sadly - Covid - so this is a much-needed reprisal that it is *finally* coming here! The Sydney leg has been announced for August 2026, but Melbourne gets first dibs in May 2026 and I am soooooo poised to purchase tickets!

• Hit Broadway Musical ‘Waitress’ Is Coming to Australia

So for anyone who has been bummed when I write about musicals or plays that are nearly closing, this is me telling you to get in early and keep your eyes-peeled for this one in 2026!