Old Aussie vibes, Reminds me of Nana. ( )

I read this because it was a gift. It is well outside my comfort reading zone in many ways, although I do like recent-history stories, and Australiana.

However, I struggled with reading the story, typically only getting through 2-3 pages at a sitting. I found the majority of the characters unlikeable at best, and many of the reflections on small town life to be particularly unpleasant. Essentially a dystopia set in 1950s rural Australia. ( )

I saw the film first, and loved it, so I opted to read the book. I quite enjoyed the book overall, loving the combination of satire/humour, tragedy and drama, as well as the textile details, which can be confusing to anyone not familiar with the process, but add a particular style and layer to the story that makes it fun for those who love working with textiles (When the Sergeant can't read the knitting pattern as presented, I hadn't even realized that it wasn't clear instructions!). I loved how the story showed the outcasts being sympathetic to each other, and connecting as friends. For me, this book is iconic for some of the vocabulary choices it employed, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for a dramedy read. The only reason this book is not five stars is because of the ending - which I actually prefer in the movie, because I felt that the sergeant did not deserve to have all his outfits burnt up like that. In the movie he is arrested for being a cross-dresser, and Tilly is distraught, in the book, despite them being good friends, she burns all his things along with the rest of the town on her way out, which I found off-putting enough to make me overall prefer the film ( )

Read this after really enjoying the film. Prefer to read a book first but was interesting to read the differences between the 2. ( )

Loved this book. It's dark with a little glimmer of hope. And then all hope is dashed and everyone comes to a very bad end.

Tilly Dunnage returns to her small hometown after a 20 year absence to take care of her elderly and sick mother. As the book progresses, we see Tilly's past in flash-backs.

Tilly has a complex and difficult past with just about every single inhabitant of the town, but with her return as a successful adult she's gaining acceptance she never had as a child. But then a tragedy occurs and the whole town shuns Tilly again. She has the last laugh and leaves the town in ruins.
( )

Ugh. I have no idea what to say about this book. It's not my thing at all. Hearing the narrator talk about Dungatar and its inhabitants, I kept imagining a lemon meringue pie with maggots under the fluffy golden meringue top. With the exception of Tilly, her mother, Teddy and the sergeant there were no redeeming characters in a book and town brimming with them. They were all sick, twisted, inhumane caricatures, and ultimately that's what kept me listening to the book after the pivotal moment; I had no sympathy to give to any of the characters (barring Tilly), allowing me to detach and distance myself from the narrative.

But the writing is beautiful, and the narration excellent. The narration was melodic, poetic, and always matter-of-fact, which added to the horror of the events as they unfolded.

I can't say this is a bad book at all - I totally understand why people would love it and why they made a movie of it (which I will not be watching). But these types of dark, twisted stories aren't why I read fiction; I want to feel better, or at least thoughtful, after I've finished a book, not as though my soul has been tainted by the experience.

I'm not rating this one - at least not yet - because while I think as a book it merits a high rating, I don't want to imply that I liked the story. I didn't. Neither do I want to low ball the rating and imply the book was sub-standard. Perhaps after I've sat with it a while I can come back and rate it objectively.

fiction (1950s small Australian town full of awful people, dressmaking and neighbors' secrets, but mostly revenge). I was expecting more of a period sewing story, so was pretty surprised by all the dark and twisty (and kind of bloody and horrifying) parts. I enjoyed parts of it, but probably would not recommend. ( )

Review can also be found in Chill and read


After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town she was banished from as a child. She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave. However, when she falls in love she decides to stay and become part of the small town again. Not an easy task and a painful one.

The little towners will not so easily accept an outcast, for this is what Tilly is to them. However, when they realize that her craft is really ahead of time, they will want to take advantage if it, without making the slightest effort to accept her as part of their local society.

Some things never change and so are some really stubborn people in the small town of Dungatar.

The book is a dark satirical story of revenge in the 1950s. The characters are described in the non flattering way, as all their flaws come to first view wight when meeting them. The decay that overwhelms the Australian country, the filthy people and the hidden secrets, represent a big portion of the many families across the globe those days. However, this situation has not changed at all. Domestic violence is still out there. Unfaithful husbands and wives have not stop cheating on their partners. People still marry people they don’t love and end up being miserable. Oppressed people are greedy and mean.

The author has done a great job at bringing haute couture to the foreground, among the secrets, the hate and love that surrounds it. The fabrics, designs and colours are so vivid, that the reader visualize the gowns and suites and all those masterpieces that the main character creates for her haters. The ending was an absolute must and expected one for such a story. ( )

Unpleasant and badly written. ( )

I can't decide whether I would label this book satirical or farcical! Over the top characters with no redeeming features. A disappointing read really. I might trade this one. ( )

Maybe I totally misunderstood what to expect from this story. I thought it was about a woman who moved back home after a scandal years ago and impressed the whole, unsuspecting town with her fashion skills. It sounded fun.
It's in fact very heavy. The characters were strange. There were very detailed descriptions of everything strange going on but absolutely no talk of fashion by the 100 page mark.
There's quirky, which can be fun, and then there's just plain strange and possibly unlikable.
I couldn't still with the story, I didn't find the characters likable, I just found them strange.
Maybe I misunderstood the plot of the story, I feel like I must have. ( )

The Dressmaker is a very well written book! I didn't understand many of the descriptions about Australia (as I'm not from there and don't know what Australians call things), but Rosalie Ham did a fantastic job of bringing Tilly Dunnage and the people of Dungatar to life. Tilly had been banished from her hometown, but now she is back to take care of her crazy mother. Tilly is a tragic character, having been bullied as a child and now seemingly cursed with death following her around. As Tilly settles in and begins making clothes for the people of Dunagatar, more tragedy happens, causing the people to turn against her even more. But when they are challenged to a play competition, they all come to Tilly for her stunning work. And it is then that Tilly takes her revenge. The Dressmaker is both comic and tragic and a wonderful satire on the perils of small town life. ( )

Tillie Dunnage returns to her small, rural Australian town to care for her mentally ill mother. Something mysterious happened many years ago that make the residents of Dungatar loathe Tillie. She is called a bastard and a murderer, a whore's daughter. The reader doesn't know what happened, where Tillie's been or for how long she's been gone. Tillie keeps to herself, cares for her mother, and begins to be wooed by the sun of the garbage dump keeper. Tillie's mail, opened by the postal official, shows that she must have lived in Spain and France. Her boxes are filled with herbal mixtures, fancy material, patterns, and fashion magazines. When Tillie makes a wedding dress for a local girl, the women of the town realize that she has a talent they can make use of. Strangely, Tillie is obliging.
Dungatar is filled with vile and quirky characters: an old-maid peeping-Tom gossip, a male policeman who makes and dresses in women's clothing, a lesbian postal officer who goes through everyone's mail, and a pharmacist who does not believe in treating sinners with functional medicine, to name a few.
Ham's descriptions of the materials, colors and fashions of the 1950s is detailed and fun. Tillie's secrets are revealed slowly and skillfully, and the final scene is brilliant. The revenge component was a little dark for me, but I can understand why so many people like this book. ( )

This one was definitely not my cup of tea, and I certainly hope the movie is more enjoyable than the book. I found it very difficult to stay focused while reading. Was wondering if it was the writer's style that made it an unpleasant read for me. As for the content of the book, I found this remote and insular Australian town and its people so disturbing. Yet, the heroine is a character I was drawn to. Loved her honesty, her resilience, and how she brought chic European fashions to the women of they small town. There is a massive redemptive gesture in the book's conclusion, which will make it memorable.

Review can also be found in https://chillandreadblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/27/the-dressmaker-by-rosalie-ham/

After twenty years spent mastering the art of dressmaking at couture houses in Paris, Tilly Dunnage returns to the small Australian town she was banished from as a child. She plans only to check on her ailing mother and leave. However, when she falls in love she decides to stay and become part of the small town again. Not an easy task and a painful one.

The little towners will not so easily accept an outcast, for this is what Tilly is to them. However, when they realize that her craft is really ahead of time, they will want to take advantage if it, without making the slightest effort to accept her as part of their local society.

Some things never change and so are some really stubborn people in the small town of Dungatar.

The book is a dark satirical story of revenge in the 1950s. The characters are described in the non flattering way, as all their flaws come to first view wight when meeting them. The decay that overwhelms the Australian country, the filthy people and the hidden secrets, represent a big portion of the many families across the globe those days. However, this situation has not changed at all. Domestic violence is still out there. Unfaithful husbands and wives have not stop cheating on their partners. People still marry people they don’t love and end up being miserable. Oppressed people are greedy and mean.

The author has done a great job at bringing haute couture to the foreground, among the secrets, the hate and love that surrounds it. The fabrics, designs and colours are so vivid, that the reader visualize the gowns and suites and all those masterpieces that the main character creates for her haters. The ending was an absolute must and expected one for such a story. ( )

Ugh. I have no idea what to say about this book. It's not my thing at all. Hearing the narrator talk about Dungatar and its inhabitants, I kept imagining a lemon meringue pie with maggots under the fluffy golden meringue top. With the exception of Tilly, her mother, Teddy and the sergeant there were no redeeming characters in a book and town brimming with them. They were all sick, twisted, inhumane caricatures, and ultimately that's what kept me listening to the book after the pivotal moment; I had no sympathy to give to any of the characters (barring Tilly), allowing me to detach and distance myself from the narrative.

But the writing is beautiful, and the narration excellent. The narration was melodic, poetic, and always matter-of-fact, which added to the horror of the events as they unfolded.

I can't say this is a bad book at all - I totally understand why people would love it and why they made a movie of it (which I will not be watching). But these types of dark, twisted stories aren't why I read fiction; I want to feel better, or at least thoughtful, after I've finished a book, not as though my soul has been tainted by the experience.

I'm not rating this one - at least not yet - because while I think as a book it merits a high rating, I don't want to imply that I liked the story. I didn't. Neither do I want to low ball the rating and imply the book was sub-standard. Perhaps after I've sat with it a while I can come back and rate it objectively.

I couldn’t get a handle on ‘The Dressmaker’. The characters are all described, or what they are doing is described. We do not get any insight to their motives; their interiority. Reading it was a process of going along and tripping over the author’s misuse of some words, wayward third person pronouns, and the want of better punctuation. Oh for some semi colons to separate out the author’s reconsidered second object to the subject of her sentences. Where was the editor?

At about the halfway mark I thought I had it; that the book was about gathering all these types of possible people in an Australian country town in the 1950’s as analogous to gathering oddments of fabric to make some strange patchwork gown that is symbolic of something. I figured it could only be a witch’s cape. But then the novel changed tack.

Out of the blue, the author kills of the romantic lead. Very odd. The book goes down hill from there; tripped into poor slapstick. Mad Molly, the mother, who has been good for a chuckle with her absurdities, suddenly goes all mumsy and then dies of a stroke. Others in the town get bumped off by the author – or by the Grecian ‘Fates’ hooking them on their flaws. Some of this is very funny but best of all is when the limp OCD wife of the Councillor, now wised up by Tilly, unleashes on her philandering husband. Oh such delicious bitchery. And a nasty way to waste him at the Achilles tendon – more Grecian gods of devilry. It is all out of tone of the first part of the narrative.

Overall, the novel is not well structured and needed much better editing. It is all a bit too silly but there are some nice crazy people in it and there are some good laughs to be had – possibly inadvertently. It is the characters and particularly the cross dressing town policeman who earn the two stars. ( )

Starts off okay but with far too many characters and shallow characterization. I had to make a list of who was who. About 75% into it, the author decided she needed a really exciting ending and made a complete hash of the book. The fashion was the most interesting part, and the reason I'm rating three stars instead of two. Hopefully the movie will remedy the flaws of the book, in the spirit of Chocolat, another overdone book about outcasts in a closed-minded small town with a heavy dose of magical realism. The only reason I would be tempted to see the movie is to see how Hugo Weaving does with Sergeant Ferrat--far and away my favorite character. ( )

A good story, but not a good book, in my opinion. A girl who has run away from home and made a successful life for herself, returns home to a her little "one horse" home town to look after her ageing mother. The townsfolk although still resenting her because she is different, all have there own peculiarities and hidden lives. In fact there does not seem to be one conventional character in the whole book except the hero, who if anything is too good to be true. The story is very confusing at times but should, if simplified, make an excellent movie. With such a strong cast of quirky characters played by some great Australian actors it should be a "hoot". ( )

Like most of Australia, I’ve seen numerous print and TV ads for The Dressmaker movie (and Kate Winslet does a perfect Aussie accent in them). Because I lack the patience to see a movie (not to mention begrudge the cost – it was cheaper to buy the audiobook than see the movie), I decided to listen to the audiobook instead. Now I’m intrigued to see what liberties (if any) the film takes with the plot, because the book is a hot mess of genres and despicable characters.

If you asked me to summarise the likely plot of The Dressmaker, I would say it’s about a girl who returns to her small country hometown and comes up against some resistance against the people, but it all turns out well in the end. Forget the happy ending in reality – this book contains a lot of character carnage and the ending is not happy. I’m not saying that a book has to have a happily ever after to be considered a worthy read, but the story is patchy and loses focus. First of all, Tilly (the dressmaker) isn’t the main character. She’s more like the reason the story starts where it does, then drifts in and out of the narrative. Is Tilly a heroine? I thought her more the voice of reason until the finale, when she did something that appeared just too unrealistic for what the reader knew of her character. Her mother Molly, who has dementia, is more of a delightful character, telling things how they are until she suffers a cruel fate like so many others.

The townspeople are a collection of stereotypes. We have the dowdy daughter, the girl who reinvents herself (with Tilly’s help) to snag the catch of the town, the interfering mother in law, gossips, cross dressing policeman, cheating husband and nosey shopkeepers. There’s very little to like about any of them and sometimes it’s hard to distinguish who’s who. They’re described in a fashion which is almost cruel (but I think was intended to be humorous). The majority of them all meet a grotesque fate (seriously Dungatar must have the highest rate of murder / mental illness and sudden death in Australia) and I actually lost track of the body count at one stage. It almost becomes a list to match the character with their fate, the more outlandish the better.

Rachel Griffiths started off as a good narrator – she didn’t seem to act out the story as much as other narrators do initially (maybe because she is an actress and worried about overplaying?). But then she started to get into the swing of things and towards the end (if you get this far) she did some great Macbeth! I’d love to know what she thought of the story.

My own thoughts are a bit of a love/hate mix – there are some parts I really enjoyed, such as the descriptions of the 1950s dresses and Sergeant Farrat. But it seemed to mix up genres and be so bitchy at times about small towns that I wanted to turn it off. I didn’t really think it was a comedy, it felt crueler. I didn’t understand Tilly’s final actions and some of the townspeople’s actions too seemed petty and vindictive. The ending seemed off kilter from the beginning, like the start was historical fiction and the end was Terminator. This is one case where I hope the movie is better than the book.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com ( )

This is good escape reading about a young Parisian dressmaker who returns to her isolated Australian town to care for her mother and has to confront her past. Her mother never married and she was an outcast the entire time she lived there. But her dressmaking skills force people to come to her. Add a kind-hearted town policeman who is a cross-dresser and loves to sew, and unexpected romance, and a variety of townspeople and you’ve got the elements for a good story that ends in delightful revenge. ( )

The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham is an historical novel set is rural Australia during the 1950’s. Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage has returned to Dungatar, Australia (a town full of quirky townspeople) after being sent away when she was a child. Her mother, Molly (the locals call her Mad Molly) is ill and needs her assistance. Tilly has never been treated kindly in this town. Mostly because she is illegitimate. Tilly is a fashion designer and seamstress. She starts off wearing her creations around town which intrigues the citizens. After designing a dress for Gertrude to get married in, the ladies of the town slowly come to her for unique, one of a kind dresses. Soon Tilly is in great demand. Tilly starts seeing Ted McSwiney. Ted comes from a large family that lives on “The Hill” along with Tilly and her mother. Ted was the local football star and is well regarded in town. Sergeant Horatio Farrat is the local police officer for the town. He wears is uniform in public, but what he wears underneath it (ladies underwear) and at home (ladies clothes that he sews himself) he keeps to himself. He is thrilled that Tilly came to town. She can help him with his clothing.

Then an accident happens. Ted dies in a tragic accident. The townspeople blame Tilly. They no longer go to her for dresses. They actually bring in a designer from Sydney (who is terrible). Then her mother, Molly, passes away. Tilly comes up with a way to get even with the town before she leaves.

If you can get through the first forty percent of The Dressmaker, the rest of the book is interesting to read. The first part of the book is very confusing. There are a lot of townspeople thrown at you along with their information (written with Australian slang and terminology). I give The Dressmaker 2.5 out of 5 stars. I did enjoy the last part of the book. I loved the revenge plot that Tilly concocted and executed. The clothes that Tilly designed sounded beautiful. How anyone could stand living in this town, I do not know. The people were mean, cruel, selfish, nosy, and big gossips. I am shocked that this book is being made into a movie. I really hope it is much better than the book.

I received a complimentary copy of The Dressmaker from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. The review and opinions expressed are my own. ( )

A wild romp of a story with a cool Gothic flavour ( )

This novel is full of surprises. It covers a broad range of personalities for such a small country town. Not knowing what to expect it certainly has a twist of an ending. ( )

fabulous first novel by a great friend - now looking forward to the movie - she said I perhaps could be an extra!! ( )