Trigger warning for brief depiction of suicide, grooming, and reference to rape.
If had to walk in Elsie’s shoes, I would be a much angrier, bitterer, and probably depressed than the protagonist of Sally Hepworth’s emotional novel, Mad Mabel. Since she was barely a handful of years old, she’s been blamed for a series of deaths. She even spends time in prison for one of them. Elsie is understandably reclusive, but she hasn’t let her past destroy her spirit thanks to the support of her irrepressible best friend, Daphne. That past come roaring back to claim her when a neighbor suddenly dies and word gets out that Elsie used to be known as Mad Mabel.
Apart from being the kind of person so many people can’t help but look askance at (and worse), Elsie’s biggest “sin” seems to be her mouth. She cannot be diplomatic. She’s flippant when she should probably stay quiet. She’s invariably blunt no matter who she talks to. If Elsie didn’t have a trail of bodies in her past, all of this would probably fine. One would think Elsie would’ve learned not to refer to dead neighbors as her nemesis, but here we are. Shortly after the neighbor keels over, the police come around to ask Elsie if she knew anything about what happened and why her DNA was found in the man’s house. One of those people who’s always given Elsie the hairy eyeball leaks word about who Elsie used to be, leading to their little neighborhood being swarmed by media and looky-loos.
In parallel with the present plot (told to two podcasters who want to hear Elsie’s side of the story), we learn more about Elsie’s cursed past as a friendless, slightly odd girl who is blamed for everything that goes wrong around her. Elsie has some of the worst luck I’ve ever encountered in fiction because nothing that happens around her is ever really her fault. One of the deaths really is just bad luck. All of the other deaths are caused by others. It’s hard not to feel for both past and present Elsie. I relished her bluntness and sense of humor, even though I really wanted to air drop a lawyer in more than once to get her to stop talking to the cops.
A subplot involving a neighbor (not the dead one) and her child turns into an opportunity not only for Elsie to realize that she isn’t as friendless as she believes herself to be and, for once, to be a hero. Mad Mabel is not a subtle book. From the very beginning, because we are riding along with Elsie, we know that she that she is not guilty of anything she’s accused of. And we can also see just how easy it is for unscrupulous people, the truly bad people, to turn Elsie into a scapegoat. I cheered for Elsie even as I lamented her terrible, terrible luck and her inadvisable comments to the police.