Reviews with content warning for Cursing - Golden Boys

Reviews tagging 'Cursing'

parasolcrafter's review

emotional funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

this book is...fine. its not really anything special, but its not bad, either. that being said, i do have quite a bit to say about it.

first things first, the pacing SUCKS. i had quite a hard time figuring out how time was passing (frustrating, considering this book takes place over a 3-month period) and as such it made a lot of the development in relationships feel very rushed :/ at one point, one of the characters mentions him and his friends have only been a part for a week, but the next chapter - without a mention of time passing - a different character says he's been doing his job for weeks, which could only be a typo but for me it made me think a bunch of time has passed without it being mentioned. also, overall it really doesnt feel like 3 months pass during the book; a most, it feels like a month, maybe. like...just not much happens? all the chapters are fairly short and, spread between 4 characters, that doesnt leave a lot room for anything :/ only some of the character development feels deserved, and its more or less only for sal and reese. gabe feels like he only changes because the author says so; a lot of his development seems to happen behind the scenes, which just reads wrong since he changes the most. for the pacing, i wish the book had been structured differently. since there's 4 characters, i think it would have been cool to have each month broken into four chapters, each spanning a week with each character getting their own part. it would have flowed better and made us miss the characters more. really...the pacing makes it all fall flat.

next...i dont like how the relationships worked out, especially with gabe and sal. they ended up feeling like SUCH a hollow friendship because their 'relationship' didnt seem to matter to either of them? idk, they just had such a strange dynamic, with sal especially seeming like nothing matters to him. i also didnt like matt at ALL. hes just SUCH a non-characters; hes literally only there so gabe has someone to like, and it was so annoying they got together in the end. it just didnt make sense to me. and reese and heath...they were fine, but nothing special. overall the characters just fell flat to me. they had so much potential, but it didnt lead to anything, which really is a shame.

further on the characters, theyre all so bland and fairly similar, especially sal and reese. despite the book being told in first person from all the boys, none of them had a distinct voice or personality. their personalities were more or less told to us by the other characters, but it didnt translate very well to their chapters, and it feels like we only know them all on a very surface level. i also dont like the way reese & heath and sal & gabe mirrored each other beat for beat. the chapters where they switch POV's just read as very lazy and i found those 2 chapters annoying and tedious to read; it was essentially the same chapter twice.

i wish this book had just gone a little bit deeper with everything because it was interesting, but it could have been much, much better.

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evelynyle_88's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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itsnotalakeitsanocean's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful inspiring lighthearted reflective relaxing medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

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diana_raquel's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful lighthearted medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

“I feel the past clinging to me like condensation on a glass of water. He’s everywhere around me. He’s my relief, and my protection.”

Look at me!! Reading a book I know nothing about! This was impulse buying. I liked the title and decided to buy it. However, it was a nice surprise. This is a coming-of-age story about 4 friends that decide to follow different paths during the summer before their senior year of high school. It's a story about identity, growing up, and romance. The characters are well-written and well-developed. And the story itself is also well-structured. I also liked that the reader has access to other mediums, such as images of Reese's schedule.

However, I think that the pacing is slow in the beginning. And that affected my reading experience to the point that I thought about DNF'ing the book. After the friends went their separate ways, the story becomes more dynamic but, in the beginning, it was very slow for my liking.

Still, it is a solid reading.

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philippmk's review against another edition

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funny lighthearted fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.5

This book is perfect for a light summer read, even though I read this in October. If you're looking for any more depth than that, you're not going to find it here.

Golden Boys, to its own detriment, has four main characters. As a consequence, the reader only gets to know each of them on a surface level basis. By the end of the book, it was hard for me what anyone really saw in their romantic interest (a similar issue I had with Stamper's debut novel The Gravity of Us).

For example, I don't understand why Gabe would choose to enter a long-distance relationship with Matt by the end of the book, simply because I couldn't tell what exactly connected them).

If you asked me, you could absolutely scrap both Sal's and Gabe's stories and give more space to the others. Neither of their narratives I found very compelling, as they consisted mostly of them disliking their summer jobs.

Both Reese and Heath I would have loved to see more of. We only ever get a brief glimpse of what Paris, a European metropolis, is like through the eyes of smalltown Ohio Reese when there is so much potential of exploration — both of the city and of himself. Learning to accept critique from his peers and using it to grow is also a very interesting character arc, which we unfortunately have so little room for to make it feel deserved by the end. With more space for Reese we could have also explored what it was like to grow up in a small town as a gay kid with two lesbian moms, but we don't really get into that at all.

Also, meeting Philip's conservative girlfriend so late in the book felt disappointing as this could have been an interesting character for Reese to deal with, but we only get one or two sequences with her.

Heath, however, was by far my favourite character. Not only did I find him the most likeable and down-to-Earth, but his family dynamic was the most interesting plotline of the entire book for me. Perhaps because his summer activity was less career-driven and more personal, it feels like he is the protagonist we get to know the most intimately, even if only briefly. His parents' divorce driving him to connect with the family he's never met and becoming genuine friends with his cousin was heartwarming to see. I probably could have read an entire book from his perspective.

Ultimately, I had a good time reading this book (finishing it a lot faster than I usually do), but I also see a lot of room for improvement.

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emmaward55's review

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lighthearted slow-paced

Strong character development? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated

2.5

This review is a bit of a sad one, because I'm feeling disappointment with this book.

It starts slow and the pacing felt off throughout. Having four point of view characters can be tricky at the best of times, but it was too many narrators in the allotted space. Stamper would have done better either by spending more time with each boy (and giving us a longer book) or cutting one of the POVs. This is a shame to say, because at first all the different stories sound so interesting, but we're never with any character long enough to get anything of substance from them. I know as much about these boys in chapter sixty as I did in chapter ten.

Heath suffered the worse from this, with what felt like barely any chapters to live out his child-of-divorce plot. I can list off five surface-level facts about his life and that's it. I didn't get why Reese had such a thing for him. Reese is also the other character who doesn't seem to undergo any significant transformation during his "character arc", if we can call it that. He decides he likes a slightly different field of art better than his current interest and that was... it? There was no sense of passion from him in his chapters, no inspiration or excitement in his telling of events. He was boring for an artist.

Sal and Gabe fare better overall, with the former confirming that he has no idea what his next step is, and the latter getting a shot of confidence for the first time. Sal's plot was the most interesting. I could have read an entire novel just about Sal's time interning for the Senator.

Honestly I'm losing interest in writing this review now. I don't think it was a bad book, but it had some pretty big structural flaws. The writing isn't detailed, but it's easy to read and fine if you're just looking for some lighthearted queer romance and friendship dynamics.

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