First things first: I think Mad Mabel should come with a warning label. The madness in the title is contagious, especially in the first half of the book. It dragged me through the whole spectrum of emotions, and to make it even better (or worse), what it left behind was a deep sadness. I’d call this book tragic, and I mean that as praise.
Elsie Mabel Fitzpatrick is an 81-year-old woman who is sharp, sarcastic, tough, and grumpy. She has spent most of her life under a cruel nickname: Mad Mabel. There is a long story behind that name. As a lonely, bullied girl in the 1950s, she saw far too much tragedy up close, and that made her an easy target. People were already calling her mad back then. At fifteen, she became the youngest person in Australia ever convicted of murder, and from that day on, the name Mad Mabel stuck for good.
Now she only wants to be left alone. Being forgotten sounds wonderful to her, because being remembered has only ever hurt. So she keeps to herself on a small Melbourne lane and minds her own business. Everything is going fine until a new neighbor moves onto the lane with her little girl, Persephone. Then an elderly neighbor, Elsie’s longtime enemy, dies, and Elsie is the one who finds him. Soon her past is dug up, the old nickname is back in everyone’s mouth, and her reputation is torn apart all over again.
The part that hurt me most is how much Mabel keeps inside. Through everything that happens to her, she rarely says what is going on in her head. The people around her fill in the blanks themselves, and they get it wrong almost every time.
The vibe reminded me a lot of A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman. Both books follow a grumpy old person with a good heart, someone who never feels the need to explain themselves and gets misjudged because of it. The new neighbors add to that feeling. They build a friendship with Mabel the same way the family next door does with Ove. Please don’t let the comparison scare you off reading both, even back to back! The two stories go in completely different directions, and each one is charming in its own way.
The story jumps between Mabel’s childhood and the present day, and the closer I got to the end, the more twists came out. Every answer brought a new question with it, so I kept guessing until the final pages. And then came the emotions. I did not see them coming at all. I can’t remember the last time a story made me cry this hard. Lately, books have only left me teary-eyed, the most recent being Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves. Mad Mabel had me sobbing.
After I finished and knew every twist, I went back to read from the first page and started again. It felt like a different book. Scenes I had rushed past now carried a whole new set of feelings.
My Favorite Bits
- School is an arduous thing. Sure, there are a few who sail through it like a yacht in the breeze, untouched by its breathless cruelty, but the vast majority would agree that it’s ghastly. The stiff, itchy uniform. The unspoken hierarchy of the playground, policed far more rigorously than anything in the adult world. The lack of control over your life. The viciousness and unpredictability of a peer group hardwired to protect their place in the pack at all costs. The relentless inevitability of school, day after day after day. To add insult to injury, it’s sold to you by older folk like it’s a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. Talk about gaslighting.
- As a few choice victims know, the only thing worse than bullying itself is the shame of speaking it aloud.
- One of the many glorious things about old age is that while aspirations of beauty may linger, they sit well below aspirations of health, comfort and absence of pain.
- Of course I started a diary. (..) I wrote about my thoughts. I’d been raised in a house where feelings were something you folded up and put away, like winter jumpers in the spring. But with a pencil in hand, I found I could make sense of my feelings. It was like cracking open a secret room in my own brain.
- A silent tear slips down my cheek. It strikes me that, with all the cruelties in this world, there is still nothing quite as dangerous as kindness.
- Just when we think we’re ready to shrivel up and die, life gets exciting again.
Author: Sally Hepworth
Publication date: 1 October 2025
Number of pages: 352 pages
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