AustLit

'Ruby grows up in the time of the passive tense – when appearance is everything, when she would do well to heed her elders, and when it is acceptable to assume that men only want one thing from a girl. But her daughter, Eva, coming of age with Whitlam on the horizon and Betty Friedan on her lips, has different ideas. And although Melting Moments is Ruby’s story – it takes us from her youth to her final years – the mother–daughter relationship is crucial to our understanding of the huge arc that our narrator travels through in her 80-plus years. While she is technically of the generation before the baby boomers, some of the sentences Ruby comes out with would be met with the already tired rejoinder “OK boomer!” if it weren’t so apparent why she might feel the way she does, thanks to the careful way that author Anna Goldsworthy has painted her characters into life.' (Introduction)