The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves

Susan's Review

Australian writer Sue Woolfe has long been fascinated by the complexities of female experience and the nature and value of creativity. She returns to these subjects in her recently released coming-of-age novel The Girl Who Climbed On Rooves. The book’s main character is Frances, who struggles to overcome childhood adversity and discovers in young adulthood the profound satisfactions of reading and music. Unlike the typical coming-of-age narrative, however, the emotional heart of Woolfe’s new book isn’t the main character. The girl who climbed on rooves is Frances’s mother, Juanita: a woman haunted by her past and born too early to enjoy the benefits for women of a feminist future. 

The adult Frances, now a notable classical composer looking back on her life, directly addresses the reader and, much more extensively, her mother. Her youthful memories of Juanita cast her as a creature in a fairy tale: exotically beautiful and idolised by her husband. But Frances comes to realise that a woman’s beauty can in reality be a curse. She understands that her artist father has never really “seen” her mother; that his adoration of his wife’s lovely surface makes him blind or indifferent to Juanita’s inner self. In a blatant display of patriarchal power, he refuses to allow her to work outside the home; later, fuelled by anger at her increasingly erratic behaviour, he abandons her to live with his model and muse, a younger woman called Lexie. But in this original fairy tale turned nightmare, Woolfe refuses to stereotype Lexie as an evil temptress; recognising Frances’ intelligence, Lexie teaches the girl to read, giving her access to possibilities beyond her working-class world. 

There’s also a palpable air of nightmare in Juanita’s descent into mania. Frances bears the shame of hearing her mother shout obscenities in church; she literally bears the wounds of her mother’s repeated, ferocious beatings. Battling her own adolescent demons of pathological self-abasement and inchoate sexual yearnings, Frances nevertheless remains loyal to the mother she loves. Some of the novel’s most moving scenes show her soothing a distressed Juanita by reading her stories: such moments symbolise the life that an illiterate Juanita was denied, as well as affirming the value of kindness and compassion. 

The novel links its exploration of individual female psychology to the realities of post-war rural Australia. We see how women of Juanita’s time and place were typically confined to a stultifying domestic routine (doing the washing every Monday, making chops and peas for dinner), and feared the judgement of neighbours peering over fences to check the state of other people’s washing on the clothesline. By contrast, the next generation of urban women feel free to pursue a career and protest against the Vietnam War. Most liberating of all, perhaps, is Frances’s ultimate refusal of the romance plot which has historically defined women’s lives. As she reflects, in a tender address to her mother late in the novel: “I realised that all my life, I’d been in love with the idea of love … As you never could. For your times and in your ruination, you had nothing else.” 

The Girl Who Climbed On Rooves is a confronting and moving novel about the corrosiveness of secrets, memory as the foundation of human identity, and the power of music to transcend suffering. It’s an empathetic, thought-provoking story about the loss of that girl who climbed on rooves, then gleefully spat watermelon pips at unsuspecting people on the ground. 

Susan 

The Girl Who Climbed On Rooves is 

Publisher blurb

The Girl Who Climbed on Rooves is a powerful, lyrical novel that explores memory, music, trauma, and mother-daughter inheritance.

Told in a series of fragmented yet interwoven memories, the novel follows Frances, a composer who revisits her past in an attempt to understand her emotionally volatile mother and the unspoken catastrophe that shaped their lives. As Frances uncovers secrets buried in family silences—ranging from childhood abuse to institutionalisation—she channels grief into artistic joy through music.

Structured like a four-movement symphony, the book is both a deeply personal narrative and a broader reflection on intergenerational trauma, creativity, and the resilience of the human spirit.