Description
I play around with the colours for a few minutes, mixing them with the white. The colours I end up with aren’t perfect, but they’ll do. I don’t know why I like pastel colours so much. My life would be easier if I could get into dark colours, but what can I say? My heart is made of pastel confetti.
Golden is a warm-hearted optimistic story about friends and friendship and art and beauty—and the power of letting yourself be loved…
When you work in the juice bar of your small coastal town. When your twin brother is the fun one with all the friends. When something happened a year ago that you can’t talk about, but everything makes you remember it. When it might have been all your fault. When going to the beach, to that beach, takes all the air out of your lungs. When you’re training for the town’s annual Mud Run that you’re not even sure you want to enter. When you’re drawn to colours and pencils and paint, but you’re not an artist. When the new guy in town, the one who makes you feel you’re charged with electricity, seems to want to hang out with you.
When it comes time to let your friends back in.
Review
Seventeen-year-old Eddie has fallen apart, ever since she was there when her brother-in-law, Jackson, died trying to save a boy in the surf.
She was inseparable from her twin, Pat, but now they don’t speak. The same goes for her ex-best friend Hazel, who only used her to get together with Pat. Eddie really only talks to George, who she shares shifts with at her part-time job at the juice bar, but that is only superficial. She looks out for her older sister, Viv, who struggles to face the world after her husband’s death.
So when the hot new guy gives her attention, she is confused. And now one of her brothers’ crowd wants to run with her to prepare for the annual mud run. Eddie used to be obsessed with the mud run, but that was something that she did with Jackson. He always believed Eddie could achieve anything that she put her mind to, so this year she is taking her training seriously.
Slowly Eddie starts to mix with her old crowd, but there are many fences to mend, the biggest being with Pat. Will she ever be able to find her old self, or maybe a new version?
This book is full of relationship drama, with themes of grief, family breakdown, young love and finding your way in a close-knit country surfing town. It is a terrific read, that is best suited to teen readers aged 14 and above.
