Booklist Review
When Tilly Dunnage returns to Dungatar to care for her mother, she doesn't expect a warm welcome from the Australian town that banished her 20 years earlier. The residents are too busy with their own gossip-worthy affairs to be truly bothered, though, until they discover her expertise with a needle. Tilly has a talent for fashion, and if the ladies of Dungatar are anything, it's vain. So while they still won't tolerate Tilly socially, they are more than happy to partake of her services, and before long, every woman has a wardrobe of Tilly originals. Between this and a budding romance with the town's other outcast, Tilly actually finds herself feeling at home. But when tragedy strikes, hell hath no fury like Tilly's scorn. A vast cast of caricatures and passages of richly described fabrics and clothing decorate this dark and satirical story of revenge. With the retribution of Carrie, the quirkiness of Edward Scissorhands, and the scandal of Desperate Housewives, this novel will lend its cinematic qualities to the big screen later this year.--Ophoff, Cortney Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
ROSALIE HAM'S NOVEL "The Dressmaker" was published in Australia in 2000 and later this year will be presented as a movie starring Kate Winslet. What's surprising is that a film version took so long to appear. From the moment the book opens, with a long shot of "wheat-yellow plains" around the "dark blot" of a hill in the small country town of Dungatar, we sense that we're on our way to quirky-indie-movie land; and once the camera closes in on the "tumbling brown house" of Mad Molly, "leaning provocatively on the grassy curve," it's clear we're visiting a small 1950s town not of history but as imagined by Tim Burton: the gothic, polarized world of "Edward Scissorhands." And here we stay. The novel's quirky, pale heroine, Mad Molly's daughter, duly arrives on the next bus. "Myrtle Dunnage had alabaster skin and her mother's eyes and hair. She seemed strong, but damaged." Rapidly, Ham's arch, polished prose fills in the rest of the map: Here is the oppressive schoolhouse of grim Miss Dimm; here the dismal department store of the frightful Pratts; there the chemist shop of sinister Mr. Almanac; and downtown the dump, presided over by the cheery and fecund McSwineys, including their handsome eldest son, Teddy. All of these characters conform to name and job as tightly as a pack of Happy Families cards and are as stout and badly dressed as any of the supporting cast of "Muriel's Wedding" - and often as close to the camera. Ham's pen is never sharper than when digging into someone's bouncing "adipose apron" and "grimy arm" or noting a "tweed beret" sitting on top of a head "like a dead cat." Fortunately, Tilly (Myrtle's preferred name) has spent her years away learning dressmaking in Paris and has brought her sewing machine home with her. There will, we anticipate, be makeovers in this story, along with the other key ingredients of a teen movie: a young man in a leather jacket, a prom and a symbolic revenge taken by the town outcast. Ham doesn't disappoint - in fact, we get all of those things several times over. Having committed herself to symbolic, one-dimensional characters, Ham has no choice but to produce florid quantities of story, shuffling and reshuffling her highly colored cards. The makeovers are the best of it. Ham has real gifts as a writer of surfaces and pictures, bringing Tilly's frocks to surprising, animated life: a succulent gown in fine silk taffeta, "apricot pink, scoop necked - not too scooped - with sheer off-white tulle" sleeves makes a peach of a stolid bride; another lady's "tightly sprung and trembly form" is swathed in "long, soothing lines of pastel blue silk crepe" with a high fine net "to hide her rash." The venues for all of this finery - dances, social club gatherings, weddings, funerals - become pleasingly more elaborate as the novel progresses, culminating in a truly baroque production of "Macbeth." THE REVENGE THEME, though, is more problematic. Seeing the folks of Dungatar get their comeuppance in Ham's pictorial prose is a pleasure: They're cardboard villains to start with and have been allowed no remorse, and their punishment is as camp, ingenious and specific as anything Lemony Snicket ever devised. But Ham also proposes a real, oppressive past for Tilly, with tragedies in both her childhood and young womanhood, and they sit uneasily, even queasily, in this taffeta-thin, tulle-bright world. A movie, and the excellent Kate Winslet, may well lend them more credibility. Rosalie Ham, meanwhile, has gone on to find a better home for her serious concerns in two further, equally elegant novels. KATE CLANCHY'S most recent book is a novel, "Meeting the English."