Review: Girl Made of Stars

Girl Made of Stars by Ashley Herring Blake
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

4.5 Stars uprated to 5 stars because if ever there was a time for this topic to thoroughly permeate the consciousness of young adult readers that time is now.

"Maybe I'm a girl whose favorite person in the world did something unforgivable."

Girl Made of Stars is a look at what happens when your friend accuses your twin brother of rape and you have to deal with your growing realization that you don't know what to think other than you know your friend doesn't lie and your gut tells you something is very off with your twin. It is a story about something that happens within your community and how your community (mis)handles it. It's about consent, prior and withdrawn. About trust and violation of trust. About "he said" and "she said," and how much harm is considered legally provable harm and about all that harm that you can't see but that lingers for years and maybe forever.

"I think about all the things we've talked about... Articles we've read about girls who were thrown away by boys like they meant nothing. All the times a girl's voice seemed to mean less than a boy's..."

Girl Made of Stars was hard for me, because of the personally highly trigger-y topic. But I really wanted to read this book, which seemed so timely. In the beginning, the novel seemed quaint, like Mara's privileged life and relationships and friendships were the stuff of a breezy upper-middle-class teenage life that some teens might find unrelatable. I was almost yawning for the first few chapters. And then, slowly, Blake draws you in and before you know it, at the end of this book, you are crying about all that has been lost. Because so much has been lost and it totally transcends class and privilege. If anything, it marks class and privilege as illusory protections for girls.

I can say that from the outset that I didn't like Mara's self-centered teenage twin brother Owen. Of course, we already know from the synopsis of this book that he will be accused of raping Mara's friend Hannah. But Owen has a number of problems and they don't just begin and end with the entitlement issue. His undiscussed substance abuse and anger management problems are part of the teenage landscape and their impact on issues of rape and consent is a good book club topic for young adults reading this book. But the real topic of this book is how we view girls and women, how we value their words and their wishes and their bodies and their rights. This is a valuable book to have young women, and most of all young men, read. In a very personal author's note at the end, Blake says that we are worth the telling, worth the fight and worth a good life and love after. Hopefully, young people reading this book will internalize that and let it inform their lives.

"Changed doesn't mean broken."

I received a Digital Review Copy and a paper review copy from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Teen and NetGalley.

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