Golden hour for the Golden Boys

 

We’ve hit another era. One happened, I’m pretty sure around this time last year as well, where there have been a bunch of books published, or close to publication all really close together in March and April. Anyway, this first one is Golden Boys by Phil Stamper.

Okay, so our lovely little Blurbara Walters tells us that Gabriel, Reese, Sal and Heath are best friends, and that when you grow up in the middle of nowhere, being queer and having big dreams will bond you for life. This summer, for the first time, they’ll get to follow their dreams, but they’ll be doing it apart. It’s time to discover who they are, and who they really want to be. Will the distance divide them or draw them closer than ever? And that told me next to nothing about the plot, other than that it was likely a coming-of-age-type of story since it’s about discovering who they are. That suggests that, but it doesn’t say how.

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Chapter one opens on Gabriel and Sal in bed together, they’re just spooning, and apparently, they’re not officially a thing, and Gabriel is going to be volunteering in Boston. Sal is going to DC, Reese is going to Paris, and Health is going to the magical land of Daytona, Florida. Gabriel then mentions that Sal is the kind of person who strives for everything better, with things like grades etc, but he’s content with Gabriel being just the way he is, and he (Gabriel) is a little torn over the fact that he’s thinking the time apart could be good for them, but he also doesn’t want to let go. Chapter two switches to Sal for a moment, literally only like two or three pages, and that tells us that Sal likes being the one in control when it comes to whatever he and Gabriel have going on, but homeboy is still scared. Chapter three pops over to Reese’s POV, our boy who is headed to Paris. He mentions to the reader he wants what their little Ohio town can’t give him: “an art scene, a city with a complex history”, and he also mentions at the end of the chapter that he wants more than friendship with Heath. And then chapter four goes to Heath, and we find out that money is tight for his family, and when he goes to Daytona, he’ll actually be working all summer. Then he finishes up by saying that his friendship with Reese is really good. Uh oh, mess alert.

I feel like having four POVs can be dangerous. I’ve read one other book with that many, that I can remember, and I remember that book not using the POVs well – to the point they used one of the POVs to make it seem like we couldn’t dislike any of the characters. It was like the author subconsciously going, “Please don’t say you don’t like any of my characters.” But for Golden Boys here. The chapters were shorts, and it flitted between the four boys pretty frequently, taking the story along with it as it did. An instance of how I think this was used really well was, around the 80-page mark, the four boys have this little gathering-slash-picnic where they just get together and hang out. They play this game of truth or dare, but without the dare, and the truth is that they have a reveal something that they’re deeply worried about. And the order they played this was chosen by the little bracelets that Reece made for them all. Whoever’s bracelet was pulled from the box, that’s who spoke, and as each of the boys shared, some of them had their fears in their own chapters, and some of them had their fears in other POVs. So, it ended up being the case that if one of them was lying, you could get the vibe of what the others were thinking about what was being said.

Now I don’t know why, and it might have been because the blurb was pretty vague, but for some reason I expected that this book would be all of the events before the boys left to go to their respective places. But before the 100-page mark, they’d all left their hometown in Ohio. That’s not a negative or anything, it just wasn’t what I was expecting, despite the blurb saying they were going to discover who they were over summer.

But I will say, it seemed like the characters were all convinced that nothing would change for them once they were all in different places and time zones, like they would all be available at all times. But obviously that doesn’t happen, since, even though three of them were in the US, one of them was in damn France. I did, however, appreciate the fact that once they did all leave to go to their separate places, it didn’t just flit between all four of them randomly, the book tended to focus on two of them at a time, then jumped to the other two, so it never got too overwhelming to read, or like it was ever stuck in one place for too long.

And with what I’m about to mention, if I were to say it about any other book, I think it would be a negative, but I can tell with this book, the choice was intentional. But there was a lot going on. And again, the choice was obviously intentional, since you have four different characters in four different parts of the world all doing different things. But now, because there were four different stories (essentially) going on at the same time, that obviously meant that there would be some that I preferred over others. In my case, I liked Heath’s in Daytona and Reese’s in Paris more than I did Gabriel’s in Boston and Sal’s in DC. If I’m being honest, I would have quite happily read an entire book from Heath’s POV in Daytona – it was hands down my favourite of the four. And maybe that had something to do with the beach-y aesthetic, but I just liked it. I don’t know why.

There were definitely a few moments that I think suffered because of the fact that there were four different stories going on for most of the book. Like, there was nothing wrong with any of the characters’ stories, they all did their jobs, but because all four of them were going on at once, I do think that meant that none of them could really go as deep as they could have if there had even been, say, even one less. What I will say is, however, since this was a coming-of-age book, I feel like they have a tendency to skew towards being “things just happen” books. So, maybe the fact that none of them were that deep was kind of the point, because this was just a “things just happen” kind of book.

One active criticism I have of this book, however, is that there’s a love confession in Disneyland. I was left screaming and crying and fighting for my life when I read it, but not in the good way. I was in the trenches. This is literally just because I’m so over Disney and perhaps someone I went to high school with recently got engaged at Disneyland in Florida. But it was the most sickeningly British thing, too. Both the guy and girl were so badly sunburned, and because they’re a cishet British couple, the man was wearing a football shirt…

But that’s it. This is definitively a “things just happen” book. And, like I mentioned, I enjoyed some of the things more than others, but none of them were particularly offensive. Honestly, that’s how I can categorise this entire book: It was nice, pretty inoffensive. It had a goal it wanted to achieve, and it did it. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t blast my wig off.

Okay, bye!