A Home Like Ours offers an informative, occasionally troubling, but ultimately uplifting exploration of the lives of women in rural Australia.
The story is told from three separate perspectives, those of Tara, Helen and Jade.
Tara Hooper is among Boolanga's more affluent citizens, sharing her beautifully renovated heritage home with her husband Jon and two gorgeous children. She and her husband own the district's profitable hardware & nursery business, are part of a tight circle of friends and, on the surface at least, appear to have it all. But appearances aren't everything - Jon works long hours to maintain their store's market share in the face of competition from multinational competitors further affield, and often appears bored or disinterested. Tara is feeling unappreciated and angry, suspicious of Jon's apparent lack of attraction to her. She's taken up running with a personal trainer as a distraction from her increasing worries about the future of her marriage.
Helen Demetriou is entering later middle age without the security she'd always expected to have. She's endured periods of homelessness and subsists from day to day on her meagre income earned from a local takeaway store and her stipend as caretaker of Boolanga's community garden. Her brusque demeanour hides a sensitive soul who is fearful for her future and wary of forming close bonds with others in case they let her down. An activist at heart, Helen antagonises the rather conservative members of the community garden committee by pushing for the inclusion of all members of the community, rather than just the privileged few. Her long term goal is to establish a "tiny house" village for the use of older women who, like herself, have become homeless due to changed family and/or employment circumstances.
Jade Innes is the 19-year-old single mother of baby Milo. She's desperate to do a better job of parenting than her own mother, but is rather hamstrung by the disinterested attitude of Milo's father, an itinerant farm worker who seems more interested in drinking with his mates than being there for Jade and Milo. Jade's making tentative steps to make connections in Boolanga, joining the library to indulge her love of literature, and rather begrudgingly accepting a plot in the community garden, in which she can grow vegetables to eat and the flowers she's really more interested in.
The three women's lives intersect, and all three also make connections among the women from Boolanga's former refugee communities, originally from Afghanistan and Sudan. Initial prejudices and misconceptions are gradually broken down as new friendships are forged and each of the three main characters undergoes a sort of catharsis in terms of how they see themselves, their lives and their ideas of community.
Having grown up in a mid-sized rural town not too far north of fictional Boolanga's setting on the Victorian side of the great Murray River, I felt that Fiona Lowe's depiction of small town society, dynamics and xenophobia were well-described and representative of the reality many inhabitants experience. While there are many benefits of living in a smaller community, they can also be quite insular and offer limited opportunities for those who are struggling socially and/or financially.
The stories of all three women resonated with me, although my own present life circumstances probably most closely resemble those of the more privileged character, Tara. I found Lowe's storyline around the experience of unexpected chronic and debilitating illness particularly poignant.
At almost 600 pages, A Home Like Ours is a hefty tome and requires a reasonable degree of commitment from the reader. I haven't previously been a frequent reader of the "women's literature" genre beloved by so many of my friends and family, and it took me several chapters to really get into the feel of the book. However, by the halfway point I was well and truly hooked by the characters and their stories. I raced through the last portion of the book in a single sitting.
I'd recommend A Home Like Ours to readers interested in the lived experience of women, the challenges and wonderful gifts that come with living in an evolving multicultural community, and the importance of community in creating a sense of individual and group wellbeing.
My thanks to the author, Fiona Lowe, publisher Harlequin Australia (HQ Fiction / Mira) and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.
For additional information, see: A Home Like Ours

A Home Like Ours is the fifth novel by Australian author, Fiona Lowe. Some three and a half years after her inauspicious arrival in the little Murray River town of Boolanga, Helen Demetriou is deeply involved in community projects. She coordinates the Boolanga Community Garden, living in an old cottage adjacent, as well as bringing left-over food to the town’s parks for the homeless.

When Fiza Atallah, a Sudanese refugee, expresses interest in gardening a plot, and access is blocked by Judith Sainsbury, the Garden committee’s petty bureaucrat, Helen arranges an extension of the garden on some vacant land, and Fiza and a group of Hazara women establish new garden beds for their traditional foods. Helen reminds Judith: “the garden’s on shire land and it exists to reach the broader community regardless of age, gender or country of origin.”

At nineteen, Jade Innes is accustomed to critical comments about her youthful motherhood from people like the snooty Baby Time mums at her main refuge, the library, but she’s determined to do a better job of raising Milo than her mother did with her. In the flat she can barely afford on her Jobseeker allowance, scrimping and saving to feed and clothe her boy, she’s bored and lonely. Milo’s father is mostly absent except when he has needs to satisfy, and contributes nothing to Milo’s upkeep.

On a walk by the river, she spots the community garden, and helps out with harvest in exchange for some fresh veggies. She’s wary of the Hazara women, but soon finds they are genuinely friendly and never critical. Milo’s racist dad forbids their contact with his son, but in his absence, Jade makes her own judgement.

Tara Hooper is at a loss. The mother of two has worked hard to be trim and attractive for her husband, to no avail. Jonathon, owner Hooper’s Hardware, Timber and Steel, is so gorgeous that Tara is the envy of the town’s female population, but she begins to agonise over the reason their marriage seems to be failing: a number of unwelcome possibilities fill her mind… she distracts herself with more fitness activity with her dishy personal trainer.

Jon seems to value her business input more than any intimacy, and sends her off to the Community Garden to explore sponsorship with the Gardens’ coordinator. Meanwhile, their store seems to be the target of vandals and thieves, and the local cop is convinced that the African youths are to blame.

Lowe’s story touches on many topical themes, including racist attitudes towards refugees, poverty, chronic illness, and local council corruption, as well as the age-old subjects of prejudice, friendship, loyalty and betrayal. She easily evokes her setting and the small-town mindset.

She gives her characters passion: homelessness, its very existence in the little town denied by most, is an unenviable fate to which Helen is no stranger, and she tirelessly lobbies the shire council to approve a sustainable tiny houses project for homeless older women, who are the fastest-growing homeless demographic.

Tara’s preoccupation with her first-world problems, and her reaction to them, may paint her as shallow, but when it is blown out of the water by an unanticipated explanation, she finds her awareness of the issues troubling her neighbours and those less fortunate in the town, is heightened.

Lowe throws together unlikely allies who, when push comes to shove, bring the perfect mix of initiative, inventiveness, pragmatism, fieriness, stoicism and guts. She gives them wise words: “People think it’s the bad things that undo us. But in my experience, it’s often the good stuff that trips us up, reminding us what we had, and what we miss the most” and “When a crisis hits, it’s never the people you expect who step up,” are examples. A thought-provoking and heart-warming read.
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and HQ Fiction.