Eighty-one year old Elsie Fitzpatrick lives on a quiet street in a quiet suburb of Melbourne. She has petty squabbles with her neighbors but nothing major. She’d prefer it if her neighbor’s dog would stop going into her yard and if Persephone, another neighbor’s precocious seven-year-old, would stop coming over uninvited, but that’s about the scope of it. Until a death in the neighborhood reveals to Elsie that her long-buried secret is actually public knowledge. As her neighbors reveal themselves to be wary and suspicious of her, Elsie realizes they must know who she actually is: the famed “Mad Mabel” of yesteryear, Australia’s youngest-ever convicted murderer.
As Elsie tries to ease her neighbor’s suspicions, her sad tale is presented to the reader in alternating chapters. It’s a story about an unfeeling father and a mother incapable of standing up for her daughter, of a lonely little girl desperate for love, and the lengths to which she would go to find it.
Meanwhile, back in the present-day. Persephone’s long absent father returns to town to cause problems, and Elsie/Mabel does her best to intercede.
Mad Mabel is a very popular book and the reviews seem to be full of praise, but frankly I found it far too cutesy and illogical. The “Then” and “Now” framing is really cliched at this point, especially when it’s used to play “hide the ball” with the audience. (The book treats the identity of Mabel’s murder victim as a huge mystery, when it feels fairly obvious right from the start.) Hepworth also does very little to make Elsie/Mabel feel like an old woman, or to make Persephone feel like a real child. The other characters are basically cardboard standees. It’s all very bland in a way that’s meant to be vaguely life-affirming.
The whole story rests on everyone being incredibly mean to Mabel when she was a child, in a way that really doesn’t seem plausible. With a foundation that shaky, the rest of the novel has nothing to stand on.
