Golden Child
I bought Golden Child on a whim, after overhearing an employee recommend it to another customer at Daunt Books, a bookstore in London. Unfortunately, my life isn’t always as glamorous as that sentence makes it out to be. After London, my boyfriend and I traveled to France, where I spent most of the time projectile vomiting from the stomach flu. I went to Paris and I never saw the Eiffel Tower. C'est la vie!
Regardless, I went to London and I got a book. I dived in without any background knowledge; later on, I read that Golden Child was published by SJP for Hogarth. Hogarth Press is a British publishing house founded by Virginia Woolf and her husband. Sarah Jessica Parker (SJP) recently launched her own imprint with the company, and Golden Child was her second pick. Basically, SJP vouches for the book, but, as Carrie Bradshaw might say, Just when I thought I found a book that was Mr. Right, I realized it actually needed a re-write.
So, despite the celebrity-backing and the whimsical manner in which I discovered this novel, I did not enjoy it. Per the back of the book (no spoilers), the novel follows a family that has to make an “impossible choice” after one of their twin boys goes missing. The plot is very simple. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but in this case, I thought it was too simple. It fixates on one thing, and I got bored of that thing pretty quickly. The author, Claire Adam, left a lot on the table, and I never felt emotionally connected to a single character. I briefly vibed with one of the twins--Paul-- perhaps because he is one of the few characters who has some first-person narrative stage time. Adam writes the majority of the novel in third-person. Because the plot is sparse, I think that character development is key, and the zoomed-out, third-person account prevents me from understanding anyone’s point-of-view.
Overall, the only thing I actually like about the novel is its foreignness to me. It is set in Trinidad, which taught me about their culture and exposed me to phrases like “steupses” and “fetes” that my ignorant ass didn’t know about previously. Golden Child receives 2 out of 5 flames.
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