Stephanie Jones: Book Review - Mothers and Daughters by Kylie Ladd

In title and premise it might recall one of Joanna Trollope’s family dramas, but Kylie Ladd’s sun-drenched Mothers and Daughters is, like her fine 2011 novel Last Summer, marked by an acerbic intimacy that her British counterpart tends to elide. It also, in featuring a cast of Melburnians on holiday in a small town near Broome, gets to the heart of the matter early: the differences between its eight females are not only generational, and it’s never too late or early in life for some serious self-reflection and improvement.

Lest it all sound too worthy, fear not. Ladd is skilled at divulging entire personalities in a few well-crafted sentences, observing the women on the north-bound plane as a fellow passenger might. Caro’s always-perfect grooming and omnipresent pearls baffle and slightly mortify her tracksuited-friend Morag, who is teased by the others for the compulsive exercising that helps her maintain equilibrium in a country not her own, where she is raising three sons and a teenage stepdaughter.

Fiona, a nervous flyer, is intoxicated by Valium and soon to be perturbed by the inaccessibility of alcohol in dry Lombadina, the aboriginal community that is their final destination. Her relationship with daughter Bronte is rescued from toxicity only by the girl’s sheer good-naturedness, but as we will see, that quality is not boundless. The same can be said of Bronte’s friendship with Caro’s daughter Janey, who takes mean-girling in a direction that is no less destructive for being utterly predictable.

Morag is thrilled to be unaccompanied, but it’s not to last, and when troublesome stepdaughter Macy hoves into view, Mothers and Daughters assumes a heightened gravitas as Ladd demonstrates that wisdom is not necessarily the preserve of older folk.

The only fully sane and balanced twosome in the group is waiting in Lombadina. Single mother Amira and her daughter Tess decamped to the north several months earlier for a teacher exchange programme. The women became friends as young mothers, but the passage of time and the evolution of character present obstacles. How much of a decade-long friendship is based on real connection and commonalities and how much on nostalgia? With elegance and clarity Ladd depicts the fondness, the memory of love, that linger in place of true closeness as teenage girls come to terms with the dissolution of a tight bond forged in childhood.

Amira considers the quiet community a model of how things should be done and bristles at her friend’s assessment of it as “primitive”. While Amira and her daughter have already formed deep roots in their new home, it is a place nearly as alien to Caro and Fiona as to Scottish Morag. The isolated, no-frills setting exposes prejudice in the women and exacerbates their bickering; it acts as an emotional hothouse that mirrors the arid dryness of the landscape and lays bare every fear and insecurity.

Ladd is an arch observer of speech and conduct, and moments of casual racism illuminate a chasm in Australian culture and suggest that the divide between the heavily populated coasts and the remote aboriginal territories is more than geographic.

Mothers and Daughters is a fascinating, carefully structured and often profound examination of friendship and the titular relationships that sit at the centre of many women’s lives.