The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarah Prison – Meredith Jaffe

Meredith Jaffe’s inspiration for The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison was a real-life prison program running in the UK. Fine Cell Work teaches incarcerated men needlework and other sewing skills with the dual aims of teaching them skills that will improve their employment prospects upon release, and improving their mental health and social connections. Jaffe took this idea and ran with it: what if one of these prison sewing circles had to make a whole wedding dress?

The protagonist of The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison, Derek, is a 51-year-old maths teacher, serving seven years in the titular institution for embezzling funds from a golf club to cover the costs of his gambling addiction. He is effectively estranged from everyone he knew before his sentence began; he writes letters to his daughter and his father every week, but has never received a reply. When his ex-sister-in-law shows up for a visit, she comes bearing big news: his daughter is getting married, before Derek’s time is up.

Even though he won’t be able to walk her down the aisle, Derek is determined to find a way to “be there” for his daughter on her big day. Mulling over the problem with fellow members of the prison sewing group (‘BackTackers’), he stumbles across a solution. Together, they’ll make her a spectacular wedding dress.

With the help of Jane (the volunteer who leads BackTackers), they adapt a pattern, gather the materials, and guess at the measurements. The motley group of hardened criminals spend their precious recreation hours sewing seams, covering buttons, and embroidering forget-me-knots. But will they be able to get the dress to Derek’s daughter in time? Will she even want to wear it?

The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarah Prison predominantly focuses on Derek, but Jaffe occasionally zooms in on his daughter or the sewing teacher. These random shifts in focus do expand the story, but can feel briefly bewildering for the reader. Other than these sudden jumps, the prose flows well. Jaffe also does a great job of rounding out the incarcerated characters without shaving off their edges. The prisoners aren’t all heart-of-gold wrongfully-convicted types, nor are they all psychopathic monsters; all of them are imprisoned for good reason, but all of them are three-dimensional.

That said, The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison does occasionally feel like a (very) thinly veiled polemic. Jaffe really hammers home the point that prison programs need adequate funding. In case the ‘BackTackers’ and their mission to make a wedding dress wasn’t enough, there’s a significant subplot about funding for the prison library, too. It’s an important issue, and one that’s interesting to address in fiction, but perhaps should have been handled with more subtlety.

On the whole, The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison is an uplifting read in an unlikely setting, and probably a bit of an eye-opener for anyone of the “lock ’em up and throw away the key” persuasion.

Read The Dressmakers Of Yarrandarrah Prison on audiobook via Libro.fm here.