Review: "Miss Matty" by Edeet Ravel

Miss Matty by Edeet Ravel
Published February 2025 via Linda Leith Publishing
★★★

Montreal, the early 1940s: Fran dreams of being a star—dreams of something far away from her humdrum life of poverty. Her secret boyfriend is away in the military, and she wants to be a young bride, to live in a beautiful house, perhaps to be so far away from her parents that she doesn't have to pretend not to know them in public. Her best friend Rita, who is comfortably middle class, has no such aspirations; she's just happy to be falling in love and enjoying life as a teenager.

Overall I found Miss Matty to be a bit slow but interesting nonetheless. The chapters are loosely split between Fran and Rita, with occasional departures into letters and other material; Fran's story is a regular narrative, while Rita's side of things is told in diary entries. Fran is not a particularly appealing character—so desperate for a life other than her own that she is constantly scheming, secretly at battle with the world; she's also so head over heels for her secret boyfriend that she can't hear see of the warning signs—but that's actually what makes the book interesting. Rita, whose story has less plot, understands Fran perhaps better than Fran does herself, and so we see both Fran's self-perception (which really only becomes more accurately self-aware at the end of the book) and Rita's more realistic perception. One for readers of quiet books; the dual perspectives made it worth the read for me, but I was glad it wasn't longer.