Book review: Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe

By Simon Demetriou

At the very end of Rufi Thorpe’s fourth novel, her narrator and eponymous protagonist declares, ‘…that’s all art is, in the end. One person trying to get another person they have never met to fall in love with them.’ So, the book provides its own metric for success: did the reader fall in love? Well, no. But that’s the problem with a measure that is so all-or-nothing as love. And in a book that’s as much about perspective and emotional nuance as Margo’s Got Money Troubles...