In Golden Boys, Australian author Sonya Hartnett, winner of a Printz Honor for Surrender, wriggles deep into the psyche of a few children. In this working-class suburb of yesteryear, the neighborhood kids travel in packs, and being a child is like being "dropped on a strangers' planet, forced to accept that these are the ways of this world." Childhood is "like being in rough but shallow water, buffeted, dunked, pushed this way and that." Growing up is "an unbuckling of faith."
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. He gives his boys all the state-of-the-art loot they could want "so he will be the father of envied sons." Most recently he's brought home a BMX bike, and, in a humiliating game, makes his boys guess what color it is before he'll hand it over. Bastian, who often has a "just-hatched-from-the-egg" expression, guesses nervously, gamely playing along. As Colt dryly notes, his trusting brother's "whole world is one of those plastic kitchens in which girls make tea from petals and water."
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. --Karin Snelson, children's & YA editor, Shelf Awareness