Golden Boys

by Sonya Hartnett

Overview

With masterful nuance and vividly drawn characters, Sonya Hartnett’s novel visits a suburban neighborhood where psychological menace lurks below the surface.

Colt Jenson and his younger brother, Bastian, have moved to a new, working-class suburb. The Jensons are different. Their father, Rex, showers them with gifts — toys, bikes, all that glitters most — and makes them the envy of the neighborhood. To the local kids, the Jensons are a family out of a movie, and Rex a hero — successful, attentive, attractive, always there to lend a hand. But to Colt he's an impossible figure: unbearable, suffocating. Has Colt got Rex wrong, or has he seen something in his father that will destroy their fragile new lives? This brilliant and unflinching new novel reveals internationally acclaimed author Sonya Hartnett at her most intriguing and psychologically complex.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780763687007
Publisher:	Candlewick Press
Publication date:	04/12/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	960L (what's this?)
File size:	919 KB
Age Range:	14 Years

About the Author

Sonya Hartnett is the award-winning author of many novels for teens, including Thursday’s Child, What the Birds See, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, The Ghost’s Child, Butterfly, and the Michael L. Printz Honor Book Surrender, as well as a number of books for younger readers. In 2008, Sonya Hartnett was awarded the prestigious Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for her body of work. She lives in Australia.

“I chose to narrate the story through a child because people like children, they want to like them,” says Sonya Hartnett of Thursday’s Child, her brilliantly original coming-of-age story set during the Great Depression. “Harper [the young narrator] is the reason you get sucked into the characters. Even I, who like to distance myself from my characters, felt protective of her.”

The acclaimed author of several award-winning young adult novels—the first written when she was just thirteen—Australian native Sonya Hartnett says she wrote Thursday’s Child in a mere three months. “It just pulled itself together,” she says. “I’d wanted to set a story in the Depression for some time, in an isolated community that was strongly supportive. Once the dual ideas of the boy who tunneled and the young girl as narrator gelled, it almost wrote itself—I had the cast, I had the setting, I just said ‘go.’” Accustomed to writing about edgy young adult characters, Sonya Hartnett says that identifying with a seven-year-old protagonist was a challenge at first. “I found her difficult to approach,” she admits. “I’m not really used to children. But once I started, I found you could have fun with her: she could tell lies, she could deny the truth.” Whereas most children know “only what adults want them to know,” the author discovered she could bypass that limitation by “turning Harper into an eavesdropper and giving her older siblings to reveal realities.”

In her second book with Candlewick Press, What the Birds See, Sonya Hartnett once again creates a portrait of childhood. This time the subject is Adrian, a nine-year-old boy living in the suburbs with his gran and uncle. For Adrian, childhood is shaped by fear: his dread of quicksand, shopping centers, and self-combustion. Then one day, three neighborhood children vanish—an incident based on a real case in Australia in the 1960s—and Adrian comes to see just how tenuous his safety net is. In speaking about Adrian, the author provocatively reveals parallels between herself and her character. She says, “Adrian is me in many respects, and many of the things that happen to him happened to me.”

Sonya Hartnett’s consistently inspired writing has built her a legion of devotees. Of Thursday’s Child, Newbery Honor–winning author Carolyn Coman says, “Hartnett’s beautifully rendered vision drew me in from the very start and carried me along, above and under ground, to the very end. This book amazed me.” The achingly beautiful What the Birds See has just as quickly garnered critical acclaim. Notes Publishers Weekly in a starred review, “Hartnett again captures the ineffable fragility of childhood in this keenly observed tale. . . . Sophisticated readers will appreciate the work’s acuity and poetic integrity.” Sonya Hartnett’s third young adult novel, Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf, was named an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults. Her novels also include Surrender, a mesmerizing psychological thriller and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book, and The Silver Donkey, a gently told fable for middle-grade readers. In 2008, she received the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award.

Editorial Reviews

★ 01/11/2016
When the affluent Jensons move into town, it’s difficult for the neighborhood children to see past the allure of the fancy toys, bikes, and aboveground pool that sons Colt and Bastian have. Syd Kiley, his brother Declan, and their friends Avery and Garrick befriend the new boys, while Syd’s oldest sister, Freya, takes a shine to Mr. Jenson, idolizing this more attractive counterpart to her own drunken father and chaotic family. It’s clear that unhappiness simmers beneath the surface in this neighborhood, with everyone believing that “the things they don’t want are all they have.” But similarities exist between these disparate individuals, and as Hartnett’s narrative methodically unfolds, lurking secrets reveal themselves, with many children paying the price for their parents’ failings. Writing in an Australian vernacular and alternating among the perspectives of Colt, Freya, and Syd, Hartnett (Butterfly) skillfully weaves metaphors and foreshadowing into her affecting prose, such as Freya’s view of the world as a castle to explore, and her darker vision of a haunting yellow-eyed monster. Hartnett’s examination of different forms of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse is an unsettling, often brutal must-read. Ages 14–up. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Hartnett spins her tale with stunning subtlety, building tension in tiny doses with measured sentences and potent metaphors. Rex’s keening voice is “the frustrated sound of a night-hunting animal or accused prince,” while Freya’s father’s anger is “a quicksandy pit.” With the exception of Freya’s father’s drunken rages, the action is surprisingly mundane, nothing more than a bike ride, a conversation over tea, or scuffle between boys, but Hartnett teases so much from those minuscule moments that they spill over with a low-level, snowballing thrum of imminent violence and heartbreaking significance. Astoundingly brilliant.
—Booklist (starred review)

Writing in an Australian vernacular and alternating among the perspectives of Colt, Freya, and Syd, Hartnett (Butterfly) skillfully weaves metaphors and foreshadowing into her affecting prose, such as Freya’s view of the world as a castle to explore, and her darker vision of a haunting yellow-eyed monster. Hartnett’s examination of different forms of physical, emotional, and psychological abuse is an unsettling, often brutal must-read.
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Hartnett's mesmerizing story, told in shifting perspectives, begins with the "golden boys," 12-year-old Colt and his younger brother Bastian, sons of the movie-star-handsome, yet unsettlingly "try-hard" dentist Rex Jenson...Although there is some action—rambling bike rides, scrapes with a bully, a father's drunken rampages and grisly moments aplenty—the brilliantly expressed private thoughts of Colt and neighbor-girl Freya are what really propel this literary novel. As the salty, credible Aussie banter keeps the brutal narrative buoyant, Golden Boys dazzlingly reflects the ferocity, rage, dread, shame, guilt and dark understanding with which children view the flawed adults around them.
—Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review)

Hartnett’s writing hums with intelligence as the third-person narration focalizes through the various child characters, following them as they begin to see their domestic worlds anew...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.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (starred review)

The menacing dynamics present in so many of the relationships are persistently disquieting but also authentic, and a tone of dread pervades...Sophisticated teen readers will be wowed by this gorgeous, tension-filled novel...
—Kirkus Reviews

The kids in the book face alcoholic parents, neglectful parents, parents that look the other way, and pedophiles. The neighborhood kids refuse to remain silent about their abusive parents, and additional conflicts arise. The book’s ending is not sugar-coated—life simply marches forward. Multiple perspectives make this a well-rounded read for teens interested in realistic drama.
—VOYA

The lyrical nature of the writing coupled with the Australian terminology and difficult themes are suitable for sophisticated readers only. Young people who struggle with tough family situations will likely find this book rings true.
—School Library Connection

From the Publisher

★ 03/01/2016
Gr 10 Up—There is something unsavory about Colt's father, and readers will feel that right away. Teenage Colt is one of two principal interior narrators and the new kid on the block. His father, Rex, is a dentist and flaunts his wealth by buying a pool and cool toys for the neighborhood boys. Through Colt's eyes, readers see revulsion and awareness of his father's ploys but not much concrete evidence of his father's guilt. The work is written in a timeless gothic tone with rich symbolism and figurative language. The other narrator, Freya, the eldest of six children of an alcoholic printer, is losing faith in God and looking for a hero. Freya's father is a wife beater, and she and Declan, the oldest boy, take the brunt of the responsibility, as does Colt, when Rex proves that he is not the hero she imagines. What is remarkable about this novel is the way in which every character is developed through shifting points of view, such as through the neighborhood bully, Garrick, and neglected waif Avery. The book is a portrait of a working-class neighborhood. Readers will muse over all the relationships in order to ascertain why violence is so often misdirected with the worst offenders remaining unscathed. VERDICT An absorbing read for mature teens, ready to face the ugly truth of scapegoating to maintain social cohesion, however broken.—Sara Lissa Paulson, City-As-School High School, New York City

School Library Journal

Listeners are quickly caught up in this coming-of-age story involving the children of neighboring families—one rich, one poor—in an Australian town in the early 1980s. Narrator David Vatousios taps into the heart of the audiobook, flawlessly conveying the characters' personalities and emotional foundations. As Freya Kiley and Colt Jenson, both 12 years old, begin to grapple with the knowledge that their parents are deeply flawed, they’re unsure how to shield their younger siblings, especially because they've been uprooted in terms of their own self-images and visions of the future. Vatousios injects his performance with a palpable sense of foreboding, propelling the plot forward and making it difficult for listeners to push the stop button. This stark, truthful story will appeal to adults and teens. C.B.L. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2016 - AudioFile

2016-01-09
The arrival of two wealthy boys to a working-class neighborhood brings the strained intensity present in both theirs and another home to a boil in this latest from Hartnett, first published in 2014 for adults in her native Australia. Twelve-year-old Colt and 10-year-old Bastian are showered with the newest and best of everything by their dentist father, but his generosity is laced with a poisonous solicitude, and he eventually causes strife among their new neighbors. At the same time, 12-year-old Freya is the oldest in a large family and is resentful of her cramped, meager circumstances. She's recently begun to realize her parents' marriage is deeply troubled and struggles to find support in coping with her father's alcoholism and violence. Hartnett sets this tale in an unspecified time before mobile phones and computers, the neighborhood evidently largely white. The language is mesmerizing, her phrases exquisitely crafted, particularly when describing rot and waste, where they take on an almost gothic style: "It's an unlovely, ramshackle place, thrumming with insects, thorny with blackberry and thistle." The menacing dynamics present in so many of the relationships are persistently disquieting but also authentic, and a tone of dread pervades, though in the end, events are understated. Sophisticated teen readers will be wowed by this gorgeous, tension-filled novel, but its more natural audience may be adults. (Fiction. 13 & up)

Kirkus Reviews