Golden Boy
A compelling, brave novel about coming to terms with being intersex
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- 3,99 €
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- 3,99 €
Publisher Description
MAX WALKER - BLUE-EYED BOY OR GIRL NEXT DOOR?
'Terrific. A poignant, brave and important book. - S J WATSON
'A gripping read. Tarttelin is a natural storyteller' MATT HAIG
'Tarttelin broaches the topic of intersexuality bravely, describes the crimes committed against Max intensely, and evokes his ensuing emotions poignantly. A highly praised new author' WE LOVE THIS BOOK
To the outside world, Max Walker is a golden boy: a loving son and brother, the perfect student, captain of the football team and every girl's dream boyfriend. But Max was born intersex - neither fully boy nor fully girl. Now something terrible has happened to him, the consequences of which have left him questioning his gender identity.
Can the people around him - his girlfriend, his classmates, his ambitious parents - accept him for who he is? Or will Max's secret tear his world apart?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intense and fearless U.S. debut from English writer Tarttelin, high school star Max Walker has good grades, good looks, the esteem of his classmates, and a strong family with successful parents. He also has a chromosomal pattern that is both male and female. Intersex children like Max are often assigned surgically to one gender or the other at birth, but Max's parents raised him as a boy while deciding against removing his female reproductive organs. Tarttelin gives us a ferocious introduction to one of the repercussions of that decision: Max is raped and becomes pregnant by a childhood friend who sees him as more girl than boy. After this early traumatizing scene, the novel stays bleak, as Max goes from "golden boy" to desperate. With empathy and imagination, Tarttelin describes an adolescent search for identity made monstrous by Max's uncertainty over that self-identifier most of us take for granted: am I a man or a woman? Tarttelin, through Max, struggles to get the other characters, and the reader, to grasp the pain of being intersex with the depth of understanding he longs for, but the love and acceptance of little brother Daniel shines throughout.
