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Reviewed by:
  • Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett
  • Deborah Stevenson, Editor
Hartnett, Sonya Golden Boys. Candlewick,
2016 [256p]
ISBN 978-0-7636-7949-1 $17.99
Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 8-12

Freya is twelve when the Jenson family moves into her Australian neighborhood, bringing with them startling class sensibilities and financial privilege. Freya’s beginning to question her family’s accepted ways, and as she starts to rage against her drunken father and her complicit mother, she turns to the warmly amiable Dr. Rex Jenson as a confidante. Meanwhile, Colt Jenson, Freya’s agemate, is going through a similar epiphany about his father’s stealthily power-hungry emotional dynamic and his showering his sons with fancy toys (“His father spends money not merely on making his sons envied, but on making them—and the word seems to tip the floor—enticing”). As the families and other neighborhood kids intermingle, most often at the Jensons’ backyard pool, the attentions of Colt’s father to the local boys become more clearly questionable, sending reverberations through the kid community and intertwining with and twisting the family dramas. Hartnett’s writing hums with intelligence as the third-person narration focalizes through the various [End Page 468] child characters, following them as they begin to see their domestic worlds anew. There’s a subtle whisper of unease right from the start, and the book deftly orchestrates it, letting it swell and die back as events unfold. While the era (details place it in the 1960s or 1970s) isn’t a focus, it’s important for making Rex’s molesting tendencies a neighborhood issue and not a police one. But while this was initially published as an adult novel in Australia, it’s mostly about the kids, and how they deal individually and collectively with the sins of the adults. Readers starting to see through to the many falsehoods of the adult realm will appreciate the realism and the sophisticated subtextual work, and there are curricular opportunities aplenty for discussion here.

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