SuitabookThe stars at Oktober Bend
Glenda Millard
- Reading
- Read alongside the young person rather than rushing through the poems. Pause after difficult revelations, name uncertainty about the characters’ choices, and discuss how other people’s prejudice shapes their experiences.
- Themes
- Trauma and recovery: Alice lives with the effects of an assault and brain injury; Manny carries memories from being a child soldier. The story gives both characters emotional depth, but one response to the apparent cure and the link between sex and recovery is explicitly critical.
- Prejudice and social exclusion: Alice withdraws after name-calling and encounters people who undervalue or exclude her; the family is also marked by poverty and social prejudice. The described treatment of Alice and her family presents prejudice as harmful, including responses to disability, poverty and difference.
- Poetry, memory and voice: Alice struggles to speak but writes poems, while fragmented narration and multiple voices reveal information about her past and Manny’s memories. The unusual language is presented as purposeful, observant and revealing, with poems functioning as clues rather than decoration alone.
- Worth knowing
- Consider whether the reader is ready for references to sexual assault, acquired brain injury and seizures, a former child soldier’s memories, bullying and threats, illness, bereavement, family disruption and sexual intimacy.