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bundy23's review against another edition
4.0
Great little book despite being a bit simplistic ie. men are evil, women are powerless doormats, kids are innocent victims.
I get why dumb people breed, but I'll never really understand why the hell anyone with half a brain would do it to themselves?
I get why dumb people breed, but I'll never really understand why the hell anyone with half a brain would do it to themselves?
becmatho's review against another edition
4.0
Like an incredibly well written short story this novel is beautifully deep and well paced. I mean that as the highest compliment.
angelajuniper's review against another edition
4.0
Essentially a novel that emphasizes the sins of the father in respect to a son's penance, Golden Boys is a discomforting read about a small neighborhood and the subtleties that can be open to an array of interpretation. A new family moves to the area, the local kids meet the new kids, the parents are seen through the eyes of growing adolescents and suddenly adult fallibility becomes disappointingly clear.
It's a "is he or isn't he" sort of story that is disquieting and asks more questions than it answers. Golden Boys is easy to read and well worth it for the tight prose. However, the abrupt ending left more loose ends than I'd generally prefer.
It's a "is he or isn't he" sort of story that is disquieting and asks more questions than it answers. Golden Boys is easy to read and well worth it for the tight prose. However, the abrupt ending left more loose ends than I'd generally prefer.
oanh_1's review against another edition
4.0
The quiet and hopeless menace of poor Australian suburbs.
tasmanian_bibliophile's review against another edition
4.0
‘With their father, there’s always a catch: the truth is enough to make Colt take a step back.’
Two families are the focus of this novel, which is set in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The Kileys, with their six children, are long-term residents. The Jensons, with their two children, have just moved in. The older of the Jenson brothers is Colt, aged twelve. Colt used to be an athlete, but he doesn’t run anymore. Colt has shelves of statues - of golden boys - as a mute testimony to his past prowess. Rex Jenson, Colt’s father, invites the Kiley boys, Declan and Syd, together with other neighbourhood boys in to play with his sons and their ‘mountain of toys’. And, compared to the other children in the neighbourhood, Colt and Bastian Jenson have everything: including a swimming pool, a BMX bike, and skateboards.
For Freya, aged 13, and eldest of the Kiley children, Rex is much more sophisticated than her dad, Joe. Joe Kiley isn’t happy, and he doesn’t have a lot of money. If Joe drinks too much, then voices are raised, plates are smashed and the younger children are distressed. The older Kiley children, Freya and Declan, do their best to look out for their younger siblings. They try to make things right for others as well: at one stage Declan takes a blow from the neighbourhood bully Garrick to protect a much smaller boy, Avery.
So, for many of the neighbourhood children, Rex is something of a hero. For Freya, he becomes someone she can talk to. But is Rex someone who can be trusted?
While this is marketed as a novel for adults, I think teenagers would also appreciate it. It’s about growing up and the resilience of children, about relationships between children, about the acceptance of domestic violence, and about the insidious way in which money and power can enable predators. The novel raises questions about boundaries, about acceptable behaviour, and about taking responsibility. What can you do to change your world? Will anyone believe you?
While some of the issues covered in this novel are unpleasant, Ms Hartnett certainly provides a realistic depiction of a world that is all too familiar to many. I finished the book, and wondered about all of those Kiley and Jenson families who exist outside fiction.
‘Tomorrow, if the weather is fine, he will run, swim, ride.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Two families are the focus of this novel, which is set in an outer suburb of Melbourne. The Kileys, with their six children, are long-term residents. The Jensons, with their two children, have just moved in. The older of the Jenson brothers is Colt, aged twelve. Colt used to be an athlete, but he doesn’t run anymore. Colt has shelves of statues - of golden boys - as a mute testimony to his past prowess. Rex Jenson, Colt’s father, invites the Kiley boys, Declan and Syd, together with other neighbourhood boys in to play with his sons and their ‘mountain of toys’. And, compared to the other children in the neighbourhood, Colt and Bastian Jenson have everything: including a swimming pool, a BMX bike, and skateboards.
For Freya, aged 13, and eldest of the Kiley children, Rex is much more sophisticated than her dad, Joe. Joe Kiley isn’t happy, and he doesn’t have a lot of money. If Joe drinks too much, then voices are raised, plates are smashed and the younger children are distressed. The older Kiley children, Freya and Declan, do their best to look out for their younger siblings. They try to make things right for others as well: at one stage Declan takes a blow from the neighbourhood bully Garrick to protect a much smaller boy, Avery.
So, for many of the neighbourhood children, Rex is something of a hero. For Freya, he becomes someone she can talk to. But is Rex someone who can be trusted?
While this is marketed as a novel for adults, I think teenagers would also appreciate it. It’s about growing up and the resilience of children, about relationships between children, about the acceptance of domestic violence, and about the insidious way in which money and power can enable predators. The novel raises questions about boundaries, about acceptable behaviour, and about taking responsibility. What can you do to change your world? Will anyone believe you?
While some of the issues covered in this novel are unpleasant, Ms Hartnett certainly provides a realistic depiction of a world that is all too familiar to many. I finished the book, and wondered about all of those Kiley and Jenson families who exist outside fiction.
‘Tomorrow, if the weather is fine, he will run, swim, ride.’
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
shelleyrae's review against another edition
4.0
When the affluent Jenson family move in to the neighborhood they quickly attract the attention of the local children. Colt and Bastian have a playroom full of toys, a swimming pool and a charismatic father, all of which they seem prepared to share. The Jenson home quickly becomes a haven for twelve year old Freya and the neighborhood boys, Avery, Garrick and brothers Syd and Declan, eager to escape their working class homes marred by violence, poverty and neglect, but before long the boys sense something is not quite right, and the golden aura of the Jensons begins to tarnish.
Golden Boys is set in the early to mid 1970's, in an outer suburban locale, a landscape familiar to readers who freely roamed their neighborhood during long summer days. It explores the complex dynamics of family, childhood and friendship, and the disquieting undercurrent of violence and abuse seething beneath their ordinary facade.
Freya Kiley, struggling to understand her large family's dynamic, sees Rex Jenson as a possible saviour, but her brother's, Declan and Syd, begin to sense Rex is not quite what he seems. Colt is all too aware of his father's failings but at a loss as to how to admit, or cope with them. Garrick has no such hesitation, the neighborhood bully, he, like most children, is simply certain that someone has to pay for doing wrong by him.
With finely crafted characters and evocative storytelling threaded with subtle tension, Sonya Hartnett's Golden Boys is an artful novel.
stenaros's review against another edition
2.0
Read for Mock Printz
One of those YA books where I can see exactly where the story is going and I don't really love the direction. As a teenager I would have been less resistant to the grim ending. The author is a master of spare description and capturing emotion as well as nuance in teenage friendships. Expertly crafted and (for me) not at all enjoyable.
I know the author has no control over the cover, so this is a note for the people in charge of covers. The cover depicted a mountain bike, whereas the story very clearly contained a BMX bike. This irritated me every time I picked up the book.
One of those YA books where I can see exactly where the story is going and I don't really love the direction. As a teenager I would have been less resistant to the grim ending. The author is a master of spare description and capturing emotion as well as nuance in teenage friendships. Expertly crafted and (for me) not at all enjoyable.
I know the author has no control over the cover, so this is a note for the people in charge of covers. The cover depicted a mountain bike, whereas the story very clearly contained a BMX bike. This irritated me every time I picked up the book.
anitatang's review against another edition
4.0
Sonya Hartnett does it again - haunting and disturbing. Understated yet powerful. The claustrophobia of being trapped by circumstance while being in the landscape of open streets and outer suburbia.
backonthealex's review against another edition
5.0
Colt Jenson, 12, and his younger brother Bas, 10, had everything they could want until one night when a knock on the door changed their lives completely. Forced to suddenly move, they now find themselves living in a working class neighborhood even though their dentist father Rex makes a good living. As he has always done, and to make sure his sons meet the new neighborhood kids, he buys them all kinds of new toys, games, skateboards and his latest purchase - a very expensive BMX bike.
Sure enough , the bike attracts some neighborhood boys, including brothers Declan Kiley, 11, and younger brother Syd, as well as the neglected street wise Avery Price, 11, and thug-like bully Garrick Green, 12, Freya Kiley, 12, finds herself attracted to Rex Jenson, thinking he is the father substitute who will rescue her from a overworked mother with little time for her and a violently abusive alcoholic father.
When Rex has an above ground pool installed in his backyard, the attraction to hang out at the Jenson's play with all though those otherwise unobtainable toys is just too irresistible, particularly for Garrick. But, Colt has already begun to suspect his father's real motivations for buying all those things: the gifts Rex gives his children are not gifts from the heart, but really nothing more than bait, a way to attract kids to the house, but not so much to be friends with his sons as much as for himself. In fact, it doesn't take long before a creepy feeling begins to take hold of some of the boys who flock to the Jenson's to play.
Even the Kiley's father Joe senses something odd at a backyard barbecue that Rex has one evening, but can't quite put his finger on. But the boys have noticed things, though only Garrick seems really bothered by it and wants to exact some kind of angry revenge, especially after he realizes that Avery is on to the secret he is hiding.
Meanwhile, Freya Kiley has begun to suspect her mother might be pregnant again, the family just doesn't need a 7th child. Wondering why her parents got married in the first place, she soon discovers it was because of her. Now, feeling guilty that she is the cause of so much unhappiness for her parents, and subsequently for her siblings, she has become more aware of her parent's troubled marriage and has come up with a plan to make her father pay for it all. But, it requires the help of Rex Jenson.
Golden Boys is told mainly from the perspective of Colt and Freya. It is a character driven story, with each character playing her or his part to perfection to move the story along. As with all of Sonya Hartnett's novels, it is well written, well plotted and there is not a superfluous word on any of its 256 pages.
The novel is set in a time before cell phones and computers, so that the sense of isolation increased the tension that builds up over the course of novel. It is also set in Australia, beginning a few weeks before Christmas when it is summertime there. The setting makes no difference as far as the story is concerned, however. Golden Boys was marketed as an adult novel there, but as a YA novel in the US. I have to wonder why. The title, Golden Boys, has nothing to do with the bike on the American cover. The title refers to the athletic trophies Colt won at this old school and is a wonderful metaphor for how kids may sometimes feel when caught in the same situation as the boys in this novel.
Golden Boys is an emotionally-packed psychological novel for mature teens who have a better understanding of the themes Hartnett explores - how children inadvertently become complicit with their parent's behavior, accepting their shortcomings even as they realize them; how other adults can look the other way when another adult is behaving badly, i.e., Joe's physically violent behavior towards his family in a drunken rage and never calling the authorities, or Mrs. Jenson's obvious acceptance of her husband's pedophiliac behavior and looking the other way.
This is an excellently done novel and I would highly recommend it to mature readers, but it is definitely not for everyone.
This book is recommended for age 14+
This book was an EARC received from NetGalley
This review was originally posted on Randomly Reading
Sure enough , the bike attracts some neighborhood boys, including brothers Declan Kiley, 11, and younger brother Syd, as well as the neglected street wise Avery Price, 11, and thug-like bully Garrick Green, 12, Freya Kiley, 12, finds herself attracted to Rex Jenson, thinking he is the father substitute who will rescue her from a overworked mother with little time for her and a violently abusive alcoholic father.
When Rex has an above ground pool installed in his backyard, the attraction to hang out at the Jenson's play with all though those otherwise unobtainable toys is just too irresistible, particularly for Garrick. But, Colt has already begun to suspect his father's real motivations for buying all those things: the gifts Rex gives his children are not gifts from the heart, but really nothing more than bait, a way to attract kids to the house, but not so much to be friends with his sons as much as for himself. In fact, it doesn't take long before a creepy feeling begins to take hold of some of the boys who flock to the Jenson's to play.
Even the Kiley's father Joe senses something odd at a backyard barbecue that Rex has one evening, but can't quite put his finger on. But the boys have noticed things, though only Garrick seems really bothered by it and wants to exact some kind of angry revenge, especially after he realizes that Avery is on to the secret he is hiding.
Meanwhile, Freya Kiley has begun to suspect her mother might be pregnant again, the family just doesn't need a 7th child. Wondering why her parents got married in the first place, she soon discovers it was because of her. Now, feeling guilty that she is the cause of so much unhappiness for her parents, and subsequently for her siblings, she has become more aware of her parent's troubled marriage and has come up with a plan to make her father pay for it all. But, it requires the help of Rex Jenson.
Golden Boys is told mainly from the perspective of Colt and Freya. It is a character driven story, with each character playing her or his part to perfection to move the story along. As with all of Sonya Hartnett's novels, it is well written, well plotted and there is not a superfluous word on any of its 256 pages.
The novel is set in a time before cell phones and computers, so that the sense of isolation increased the tension that builds up over the course of novel. It is also set in Australia, beginning a few weeks before Christmas when it is summertime there. The setting makes no difference as far as the story is concerned, however. Golden Boys was marketed as an adult novel there, but as a YA novel in the US. I have to wonder why. The title, Golden Boys, has nothing to do with the bike on the American cover. The title refers to the athletic trophies Colt won at this old school and is a wonderful metaphor for how kids may sometimes feel when caught in the same situation as the boys in this novel.
Golden Boys is an emotionally-packed psychological novel for mature teens who have a better understanding of the themes Hartnett explores - how children inadvertently become complicit with their parent's behavior, accepting their shortcomings even as they realize them; how other adults can look the other way when another adult is behaving badly, i.e., Joe's physically violent behavior towards his family in a drunken rage and never calling the authorities, or Mrs. Jenson's obvious acceptance of her husband's pedophiliac behavior and looking the other way.
This is an excellently done novel and I would highly recommend it to mature readers, but it is definitely not for everyone.
This book is recommended for age 14+
This book was an EARC received from NetGalley
This review was originally posted on Randomly Reading