Just So Stories

Allen & Unwin

March 2026

ISBN:9781761182174

Publisher:A&U Children’s

Imprint:A & U Children

RRP: $22.99

Once again Gary brings his own upbringing as a young gay Koori in a regional setting [from the same part of the country as my family] as well as his professional experience working with Aboriginal youth in a skewed justice system, the pervasive racism and the blatant injustice that regularly occurs in that system to this powerful new novel.

Since his first slam-dunk with highly acclaimed The Boy From the Mish, Gary has powered on to this fourth outstanding YA novel in just five years.

In a coastal town hours from Sydney, four Aboriginal boys have grown up together in the same street. Once great friends they have drifted apart as they moved into their teens, each of them struggling in their own ways. Now in Year 12 they are on the cusp of their adulthood and the small issues of childhood are becoming the big issues in their lives.

The narrative begins some time after one, Brandon, has been killed by police in a scenario that eerily echoes many (including the recent notorious murder of Alex Pretti in the States). The court case of the police officer charged with Brandon’s brutal death is imminent and tensions in Carraway’s Point are running high.

Told from the PoV of the three remaining friends in turn, the reader follows the boys’ wrestling with their grief and anger over the friend’s death as well as their own personal struggles to fully realise and embrace their own identities. And as their senior year closes, they are also at the decision making point of what next after school.

Kallum has returned from Sydney after losing his sports scholarship at a prestigious private school. His dreams of playing for the mighty Rabbitohs are in tatters, and his father is on his case about the alternative path to being selected for first-grade as soon as his feet touch the home turf. The problem is, the more he thinks about it, the less sure he is that football is still his dream. The complication of uncertainty about his sexuality is causing him untold misery, his yearning for the less complicated friendships of years and his evolving thoughts about a future without football all begin to take his thoughts to a different direction.

Jordy, has already come out and is now quite at ease with the outcome, even with the barbs and insults that still come his way. However, since the death of his mum the previous year the heavy responsibilities he shoulders for his younger brother and little sister as Dad drops the ball of family life are putting a lot of pressure on him, not to mention having a boyfriend who is still closeted.

Then there’s Dylan, who has his heart set on film school in Sydney on a scholarship but is terrified at the prospect of having to testify in the upcoming court case. He knows the truth. He knows that Brandon was murdered. He knows that the police officer who shot him did so intentionally and also that none of the others attempted to save the boy. He also knows that he is in real danger of being ‘eliminated’ by the redneck racist mates of the cop in question.

The boys know that there has always been a savage and cruel racism underlying the town’s population, which is not to say there are not those who do not condone that attitude. In fact, like most places I’ve ever known there are people who are the right sort and then there are those who are so vile that it makes one shudder.

This is a tense and thrilling narrative laced with such visceral reactions both by the characters and the reader that it almost exhausted me reading it. I was with these boys every step of the way and felt for them all.

I think anyone reading this will feel the same and be urging them forward. It is not a read for the faint-hearted and I would certainly suggest caution as to the age group to whom you make this available. I’d suggest that at least Year 8, more probably Year 9 would be your safest path and it is equally a book that adults would not only read but enjoy, and from which they would learn.

As a shared novel it would be fantastic and open up for so many rich discussions about the state of play both in our country and in that destruction of democracy happening overseas for the dispossessed and marginalised. Congratulations to Gary for this splendid new novel and it’s a 5 ❤️🖤💛🖤❤️rating for mature readers.