Isobel's struggle to understand the world she was living in. Her joy when she discovered books and found that in them she had friends and somewhere to belong. I loved her gradual blossoming once she had left her parents' house and found she was someone worthwhile. Later, when she revisited her old neighbourhood as an adult, she was to realise that most of the fears that had been ground into her as a child were lies. She was free. Free to become the person she knew she could be

I confess to not having wanted to read fiction much for some years now. Reading other people's take on their own little segments of the world all seemed rather inconsequential and hardly to be rated against the best non-fiction. So now having established my philistine credentials, I have to say that Amy Witting has entirely won me over. This novel has the freshness and immediacy of what I consider to be good writing. As an Australian, the evocation of an older Australia, brought back odd memories of a Melbourne childhood. The setting is Sydney, sometime in the first part of the twentieth century and I suppose between the two world wars. The outer world hardly figures as the action mostly takes place within the child's universe, centring on the discordant relationship between Isobel and her mother. The emotional sadism of her parents is borne home to her when she makes a trip down "memory lane" to see her old house - both parents by then being dead - and meets a former neighbour of whom she had lived in dread due to an imagined misdemeanour, conjured up by her parents. But ultimately, "I For Isobel" is about a writer coming to understand her vocation, to understand her freakish bookishness and compulsive descent into the word "factory", her instinctual ability to observe, collect and record what she sees. For the first time in a long while, I can see that the writer's craft when it is practised at Witting's level is rather worthwhile after all.