Facing a Hard Past Together: A Review of The Stars at Oktober Bend

Alice is fifteen years old, but she believes she will always remain twelve. That was the year two young men from her town in Australia raped and beat her, leaving her in a coma for weeks and with difficulty speaking ever since. That same night, her grandfather pursued her assailants, causing their death, and he has been in prison ever since. Now she lives with her fourteen-year-old brother, Joey, who mainly looks out for her, as her mother left years before, her father died, and her grandmother is ill and weak. But Joey is changing. He’s in love with classmate Tilda and spends less time at home. Alice also has a secret friend – Manny, a former child soldier from Sierra Leone who has been adopted by a wealthy older couple. Unable to speak well, Alice writes poems that reveal her thoughts, and she leaves these poems in places around town where Manny finds them. Eventually the two meet and through their shared experiences of childhood violence, they both begin to heal. Yet the racism of Manny’s soccer teammates, and their prejudice against the disabled Alice and her impoverished family lead to physical threats and the specter of more violence.

Alice’s poetic narrative reveals the rich inner life and keen intelligence of a teenager excluded from school and written off by her society. Along with her chapters is Manny’s more direct narrative, which hides as much as it reveals. The acclaimed Australian author Glenda Millard has created two distinct and powerful voices, characters who watch each other from afar but come together in the end. While there are a growing number of books featuring disabled protagonists, few of them explore what it is like to become disabled as a result of the violence and cruelty of other humans. Coming to terms with this knowledge, with this reality, adds another dimension to the experience of disability, and through Alice and Manny’s first-person narratives Millard handles these topics with conviction and compassion.