Millie Mak the Mender (Millie Mak, #2)

By Alice Pung

Illustrated by Sher Rill Ng.

Reviewed by Helen Gearing

Alice Pung OAM is one of Australia’s most decorated contemporary writers, delivering the State of the (Writing) Nation Address in 2021 and receiving an Order of Australia for her contributions to Australian literature in 2022. Millie Mak the Mender, the second novel in Pung’s latest middle-grade series, explores topics including poverty, race, and ageing with sensitivity and respect.

We first met Millie Mak in Millie Mak the Maker, where the nine-year-old gives new life to ordinary objects, turning old fabrics into beautiful clothes and broken toys into new creations. Like the first title, Millie Mak the Mender also contains two stories (and corresponding instructions on how the reader can recreate Millie’s inventions) in one beautifully produced hardback volume. However, while close family relationships still play an important role in these new stories, there is more of a focus on Millie’s relationships with her friends.

‘Shanelle scraped her stick across the cement. She was like an echidna, curled inwards, prickly, private.’

In the first story, ‘Cocoa Shanelle’, Millie, now ten, visits her mum’s workplace – an aged care facility – and is unsettled by how frail and vulnerable many of the residents are. When another girl in her class steals credit for Millie’s idea to help the residents, Millie is shocked at who comes to her defence: a sharp-mouthed outsider named Shanelle. However, as the two classmates bond, this changes the dynamics between Millie and her best friend and Millie finds herself having to mend relationships, as well as craft projects.

In ‘Smarty Pants’, Millie’s creative outfits have won her and her friends the opportunity to appear on a national television program featuring child innovators. However, Millie (already feeling awkward and shy as the tallest in her class) is much less excited at this prospect than her friends, which leads to tensions that push the group to breaking point. The group also faces prejudice against their ‘soft’ (i.e. not STEM-related) craft projects, and television professionals who are more interested in the commodification of diversity than in the girls’ real stories.

Millie Mak the Mender is illustrated with warm, whimsical drawings which offer comfort and familiarity to stories which (very sensitively) explore big topics. Readers eight years and older who enjoyed the previous Millie Mak book will thoroughly enjoy this story too.

HarperCollins 2024

Alice Pung