October, October Katya Balen

Reviewed by Bex

A rare and beautiful read. A book written for adventurers, those who love the wild. It’s had a profound, raw and lingering effect on me. So much so, I’m still undecided whether I’d like to be October, the young girl in the book, or if the author’s writing was so remarkable that I feel I was October for the time it took me to devour it.

Written in Katya Balen’s beautiful style, October brings her world to life with compelling descriptions filled with the woodsmoke smell of crisp forest mornings and overcrowded, grey suburbia as she fights to remain wild and true to her roots.

“We live in the woods and we are wild… Just us. A pocket of people in a pocket of the world that’s small as a marble. We are tiny and we are everything and we are wild.”

October and her father live in the woods. Her mother or “the person who calls herself my Mother” as she refers to her in the book, left when she was four. “I don’t want her. She’s not wild like we are.”  Her visits make October flee to the trees. The struggles between them unfold and we’re left routing for October to let her Mother into her heart.

October enriches the reader’s life, by taking them on her emotional rollercoaster. A free, wild spirit whose father’s injury leads her to be a bird with clipped wings in a city far from her world.

A story that will forever be a favourite. Unforgettable – both the heroine and the writer.

October, October Synopsis

October and her dad live in the woods. They sleep in the house Dad built for them and eat the food they grow in the vegetable patches. They know the trees and the rocks and the lake and stars like best friends. They read the books they buy in town again and again until the pages are soft and yellow – until next year’s town visit. They live in the woods and they are wild. And that’s the way it is.

Until the year October turns eleven.

That’s the year October rescues a baby owl. It’s the year Dad falls out of the biggest tree in their woods. The year the woman who calls herself October’s mother comes back. The year everything changes.