{ Review } The Girl Made of Stars by Ashley Herring Blake

“It’s changed me forever, but changed doesn’t have to mean broken.”

Read in  May 2020

Spoilers

In Girl Made of Stars, we follow Mara a teenage girl living her normal and happy teenager life, outside of the fact that things are strained between her and her ex/childhood best friend Charlie. Until one day her world shatters when her other best friend, Hannah, accuses her twin brother, Owen, of rape. And of course, Owen has a very different version of that night’s events. Mara is lost, she knows her twin brother, they are close, they have been raised together, he is a good person, therefore, there is no way he could have done that, right? But she also knows Hannah, she is not a liar, and she doesn’t want to be the one that didn’t believe her own best friend. These events bring back up some memories in Mara past that she is not ready to deal with.

This book is a true masterpiece. It’s so beautifully crafted and I’m shaken by how much it resonated within me. I’ve personally never been sexually assaulted but I some of my close friends have, and up to this day, I still can’t believe how many women I know that have been raped and/or sexually abused. And I can tell you, none of the rapists has been convicted, it shows how wrong and unsafe our society is and, in my opinion, this book pictures the current situation of women so well.

“This. This is why I never said anything. Because no one ever believes the girl.”

The narrative around Mara’s trauma was brought up through blurry flashbacks. They were not plentiful but still vital for the story as a whole. The worldwide statistics on rape are terrifying and this book portrays with precision and authenticity the horrid reality. In the US, two-third of the rapes are committed by someone the victim has or had a relationship with like it’s the case in the book. For 85% to 90% of the rapes, the victim knew and trusted the rapist. On that note, I recently discovered @the.sisofficial on Instagram and they make the most amazing feminists reels, I strongly advise you to check them out.

The diversity of the characters is on point. As I said, Mara is bisexual but she also deals with anxiety issues and panic attacks and we also have Charlie who is gay and genderqueer (though she uses her/she pronouns to describe herself). In my opinion, those representations were perfectly executed and Mara truly felt like a true character with her own growth and development. Charlie trying to come to term with her own identity as a genderqueer character was also beautifully written. The whole relationship and evolution from childhood best friends, to lovers, to exes, to something else was everything and the book was worth reading only for the two of them.

“Some parts of me are gone. Some others have come alive, woken by the need to fight, to matter, to be heard. Some parts are wary, others angry, others heartbroken. But I’m still me. I’m still moving.”

The only part that was a bit disappointed with the brief love-triangle in this book, between Mara & Alex, Owen’s best friend. I felt like it was useless in the characters development. It was the part that interested me the least and I really liked Alex, he seemed like a really good man, and it felt mean to him to make Mara going out with him in order to forget her problems when he had true feelings for her. I know in the end he allegedly said that he was okay to end things, but I didn’t buy it. I understand that it was kind of necessary for Mara’s development but I’m sure it could have been handled some other way.

Have you read or will you read this book?
What did you think about it?