11 Ruby Road 1900 by Charlotte Barkla

Title: 11 Ruby Road 1900

Author: Charlotte Barkla

Genre: Historical Fiction

Publisher: Walker Books

Published: 6^th March 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 192

Price: $16.99

Synopsis: Dorothy and her family have moved to the city, and life is very different to the rural one she has known. Ruby Road is bustling – full of families and children, horse-drawn carts and even a mysterious dog. Best of all her new home has a secret writing room that only she knows about.

There are many reasons for her family’s move, but Dorothy has her own plans. She has to settle into a new school, make new friends and find an ingenious way to help the suffragists in their fight for women’s right to vote! Perhaps her secret writing room holds the answer.

Join Dorothy and the inhabitants of 11 Ruby Road in 1900, as a newly federated nation, and a new century … begins.

~*~

1900 – the year before Australia becomes a federated nation of colonies. Dorothy McIntyre and her five sisters – Ivy, Florence, Margaret, Evie and baby Helen have moved from their farm to the Ruby Road in the city of Brisbane into Aunt Mildred’s house at number 11. The city is very different – she has a new school to get used to, new friends to make, and finds out about the suffragists and their fight to get women the vote. With so much going on, and her constant struggles at school with her needlework and handwriting, Dorothy longs to write a play – a play that will unite the children of Ruby Road and hopefully, everyone.

1900 was a year of rife inequality for races and genders in Australia, and 11 Ruby Road is coming to life, filled with people looking to make a new life. For Dorothy, when she meets George Lin, the son of a gardener at a neighbour’s house, she feels like she has found someone who gets her She’s the middle sister – too young for Ivy and Florence, and too old to play dolls with Evie and Margaret. It’s stories where she finds her solace, and in her secret writing room, she comes up with a plan to make friends with the kids in the street.

But the world isn’t as perfect and as fair as Dorothy strives to fit in. This is a novel that explores inequities and inequality in a way that children can understand and relate to, whilst teaching them what early Australia was like and the lengthy fights that people of all kinds had to go through to gain equality and the right to vote, and in this book, the focus is on women with a peppering of racism against George, whom Dorothy stands up for and at least convinces her Ruby Road friends and family that he isn’t what they assume he is. I felt that doing this, having Dorothy believe in equality and have opinions that were not as common place back then worked. There would have been people who shared these thoughts and beliefs, but given the society at the time, may have been uneasy sharing them. Dorothy certainly wasn’t and nor was she afraid of calling people out for being racists, making her a very powerful and exciting character.

This is the kind of book that would have appealed to me as a child, and still does as an adult reader, as I could see the deeper history within as Dorothy was learning about her world, and questioning everything – questioning why they were only fighting for women to get the vote. Why weren’t they fighting for Aboriginal people, or people like George? As Aunt Esme says, some things need to be taken one step at a time. Especially in a society where it took a long time to get people onside to help women get the vote, and I think this sentiment spoke to how people saw and understood their world at the time – the knowledge they had and the way they used it. In reading this book, I felt like I was reading the beginning of a potential series, and it will be interesting to see if this happens and what comes next. I have loved several of Charlotte’s books, and I think this is her best one so far – I loved Dorothy and her family, and I really want to know more about them, and I hope other readers do as well.