Huge thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for my copy, 2/5.

Short novel about a young Irishwoman working in the wardrobe department of a London theatre in the early 2000s. Too provincial, fat and Irish for the London theatre scene and too progressive and feisty for her conservative Irish father and extended family, Mairead feels untethered. The book touches on sexism, xenophobia and classism but it is not until her grandmother dies and her mother shares an experience of her own that Mairead finds some pluck and starts to be the driver of her own life.

This isn’t bad, the characters and dialogue are believable, but it just feels a bit unnecessary. I’m not sure what the point is - there was no compelling plot, there was no great insight, the prose was competent but not beautiful, etc.

Just read a Sally Rooney instead.

‘The Wardrobe Mistress’ is a novel which is set in two very different worlds – that of early twenty first century London, where Mairead works in the wardrobe department of a London theatre, and the family home in rural Ireland where she returns for her grandmother’s funeral.
I struggled to engage with Mairead and her life in London. Perhaps the drab descriptions and muted feelings are meant to suggest Mairead’s disaffection. The depiction of her mundane days in ‘theatreland’ drags and, for some reason, this world feels as if it exists in post-war London rather than the very recent past. The theatrical stereotypes encountered don’t help either.
When she returns to Ireland, we begin to understand why Mairead is as she is through the familial relationships that are developed in this half of the novel. However, I’m not sure that this development redeems the narrative overall. Elaine Garvey can clearly write well but ‘The Wardrobe Mistress’ gave me nothing new or better portrayed than other recent novels I’ve read that have focused on difficult family dynamics and the damage they cause.
My thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.

Mairéad is a young woman between a rock and a hard place. Small town, small mind Ireland is not for her but then she’s adrift in the metropolis of London too.

Her character is not fully developed and some of her co-characters appear to be stereotypes of the theatre scene. And we are left with a question unanswered - what is her ‘sickness’? Margaret suggests one thing but there is no evidence for that in the rest of the novel.

More flesh on the bones needed.

I have to be totally honest and say that as I started to read this book, I thought it wasn’t for me. But, after a couple of chapters, I was drawn into the story and became enthralled with the life of Mairéad behind the scenes in the wardrobe department of a struggling London theatre. Most of the story is set in London, but when she returns to Ireland for her grandmothers funeral, a lot of Mairéads characteristics fall into place and we understand a lot more about her and her life choices. On the whole, I would say this is a good book and well worth a read. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in return for an honest and unbiased review.

I got off to a slow start with this book and struggled to warm to Mairead and the theatre people she works with in London. However, I could see the difficulties she had in fitting in and adapting to the new life she had chosen, leaving her family and old life in rural Ireland. Only when she goes home for her grandmothers funeral do you see how different and claustrophobic her Irish life was and I found myself cheering for Mairead when she decides to return and embrace her London future once more.

Elaine Garvey's "The Wardrobe Department" tells the story of Mairéad--a woman who works in the wardrobe department of a London theatre. She's a bit rudderless and unsure of what she wants to do. She comes from Ireland, and she lives a short of ghostly existence, barely present in her day-to-day life. Through her interactions with people in the theatre, we see how she constantly has to manoeuvre the disparate personalities that make up a theatrical production.

The book then shifts to Ireland where Mairéad returns for a funeral. Here, family tensions boil over, and longstanding truths are finally revealed. When Mairéad returns home, we see why she does not actively engage with the people around her when she's working in London. She's developed passivity into an artful defence mechanism.

Garvey has a clear eye for what transpires behind the scenes in the theatre, and she creates vivid portraits of these theatrical types. Even those of us with minimal knowledge of the theatre will recognise many of the types she writes about here. Garvey has a keen eye for the offbeat bit of dialogue or the revealing part of someone's personality. These parts of the novel are my favourite passages in this short novel.

The novel is let down by two things. The Irish funeral section feels too familiar, and less developed. The characters in the Irish funeral section are not as sharply realised. The novel also has too many characters in both sections, so it's often hard to remember who is who and how they are connected to Mairéad. This makes reading the novel a bit frustrating at times because there are just so many relationships to keep track of, and I think the novel could have been longer so that the reader could have spent time with Mairéad and her professional and family lives. With that said, it's always a good sign when you want a novel to be longer not shorter.

A beautifully written, poignant piece about work, theatre, grief, Ireland, family and independence. I found Mairéad to be an extremely relatable character in terms of her mindset towards many things.

As a big theatre fan, i loved the themes and truly felt that I was up in the dressing rooms, sorting through laundry with Mairéad and her colleagues.

Although short, and featuring many characters, Garvey avoids spreading the story too thinly and instead has created a lovely powerful bittersweet story.

I really enjoyed this book about a gauche Irish girl coming of age in a London theatre. There are some beautiful parts of the book and Mairead's mixture of both awkwardness and moodiness are beautifully explored. Her visit to Ireland for her grandmother's funeral gives an extra insight into why she is like she is and the novel ends on a beautiful and hopeful note. I look forward to reading Elaine's next book.

An elegant, assured debut that doesn't read like a first novel at all. In London, Mairead mends and toils in the wardrobe department of a theatre, running between the building and the cobblers' to repair shoes, sponging bodily fluids off costumes and raiding Old Compton Street shops for cheap seamed stockings, never quite in the right place, always skint and hungry, dodging the attentions of the male actors and producers who seem to have it all. When her grandmother dies and she returns to Ireland for the funeral, she is forced to reckon with the past and make her own decisions about where her life is going before moving ahead. A curious, elegant book, well-researched without bogging the reader down in too much unnecessary detail, and I look forward to seeing more from Elaine Garvey.

It's a book of two halves - we see Mairead living a life in London as part of the wardrobe department in a small theatre, we feel her awkwardness and her lack of belonging as she struggles to fit in with the life she has chosen. Then when a relative dies she returns very suddenly to Ireland, where we see the characters and the forces that have shaped her. It's a raw and disturbing account and it's very well-drawn, from her own experiences and particularly when she gets to hear her mother's story for the first time. It's a very moving account, very compelling.

I enjoyed the setup of this book, over a weekend. Half of it’s based in London, the other in Ireland.
I thought first half was fascinating, set in a theatre in London’s West End. The low-down on daily task in the wardrobe dept was fascinating, from putting on laundry before you leave at night, to rushing to cobblers before curtain up.
In the second half, it is set in Ireland and goes through family dramas at a funeral. There is an undercurrent in Ireland that I never understood and I get a little frustrated at books that don’t tell you what is going on.
There are a lot of topics touched on but just left vague at the end. Reality of life, I get that but it takes away from what started as a very engaging world.

what a beautiful cover. i cannot wait to see it published in real life! i enjoyed this book too. thank you so much for giving me the e-arc!!

At the start of the book I'd thought I was reading a story set post WW2. I'm not sure why I'd got that in my head, but somehow the backstage life felt like a historical setting, and so it was a jolt when a mention of something contemporary jolted me to realise I was reading a story set in 2002. Anyway, confusing starts aside, I started to enjoy the book once our main character heads back to Ireland for a funeral. I felt the family life there was well captured, and I was interested in the history there, the different characters, the conversations and the funeral arrangements. I hadn't been sure what the point of the theatre part had been before, but I felt it did come together at the end.

When I started this book, I thought it was going to be a fictional telling of life behind the scenes in the theatre world. But it is much more than that. We follow Mairead, who works in the costume department/wardrobe at a run down theatre in London. She is essentially a dogsbody and is stuck doing the worst jobs and running errands for those around her. She gets paid a pittance and is too exhausted to do much else other than work. We also see how much self doubt and low self esteem Mairead has and that is emphasised when the story returns her to her hometown in Ireland. She gets stronger as the book goes on though and this leads her to make a couple of big decisions at the end.

This book touches on quite a lot given that it’s quite short. There is a lot around Mairead’s emotions as well as a focus on family dynamics. And even though it’s set in 2002, there are some strong #metoo themes in a world before that phrase existed. If only we had no need for it now!

While I enjoyed reading this book, I felt it lost it’s way at times. Some of it felt a bit repetitive and by the end I didn’t feel as emotionally invested as I had hoped. But maybe that was just me! If I could, I would give it 3.5 stars but will give it 4 because I think the themes are really interesting and I would certainly read another book by the author.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book.

The novel follows the story of Mairéad, a young Irish woman working in the wardrobe department in a run=down London theatre in the 2002. She's a lonely misfit, good at what she does but lacking in confidence and at the mercy of mysoginists and uncaring people. She goes back to Ireland for her grandmother's funeral and we begin to understand why she is like she is.
This is not a rip-roaring read where a lot happens. It's a quiet and sensitive and moving story which could have plummeted into the depths of despair. But it didn't and the resiliance Mairéad shows in the face of adversity gives the reader hope that things will turn out all right for her in the end. I would love to revisit the protagonist ten or twenty years later and see how her life panned out.
Thank you to the publishers and NetGalley for the advance reader copy of this novel.

Really interesting book that I didn't expect to love as much as I did. Quite introspective and very beautifully written.

Really enjoyed this book, was a real page turner. The characters were very interesting. Thanks to Netgalley for an advanced copy

This novel which is set in 2002 is about a young Irish woman, Mairéad Sweeney, who has moved to London to work in a West End Theatre’s wardrobe department, where her long hours are spent mending, washing and running errands. She doesn’t really fit in and is subject to bullying by the show’s producer. She does have ambition but feels stuck.
Later she returns to Ireland for her Grandmother’s funeral and begins to understand the reasons for her past choices and what she must do to change herself and her future.
Although well written and recommended for readers who enjoy books by authors such as Louise Kennedy, (whose debut novel Trespasses I adored), for me it didn’t reach the same dizzy heights. The first section of the book gets too bogged down in the minutiae of the clothing repairs Mairéad is required to do. For me it got far more interesting when Mairéad returns to Ireland and the machinations of her family.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Canongate for an ARC

I read this really quickly, it was compelling . The strong characters, the theatrical setting, albeit the seedy background and the fantastic central character made it. I loved the fact she wasn’t a cliched Irish girl in London and the detail about fabric which was literally woven throughout the book. I’d absolutely read whatever else Elaine Garvey comes out with. This really doesn’t read like a first novel. Thank you.

3.5 stars rounded up.

It's 2002 and Mairead has left her family home in the north-west of Ireland and started a new life as a wardrobe assistant in a London theatre. Working split shifts in a thankless and unglamorous role with no real friends to speak of and a room in a house share, it's far from what she dreamed of.

It's clear early on that Mairead offers everyone else as little grace as she gives herself, we only start to learn how and why she came to be this way in the second half of the book.

I struggled a lot with this initially, finding it hard to be thrust into the headspace of someone who feels so overlooked and is so wrong-headedly sure of other people's motives.

However, I found the minutiae of life at the theatre fascinating, so that kept me reading, and I'm glad of it because everything did come together very well at the end.

Thanks to Net Galley and Canongate for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.