Our Beautiful Boys
A Novel
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
When the star players on a high school football team are accused of violence by another student, their secrets—and the secrets of their parents—threaten to shatter their entire community in a gripping novel of race, class, and privilege from the author of Members Only.
“Timely and timeless . . . gorgeous yet understated storytelling . . . The struggles in Our Beautiful Boys are not exceptional dilemmas but rather uncomfortably common situations.”—Nic Stone, The New York Times Book Review
Vikram Shastri has always been a good kid. He’s got a 4.6 GPA, listens to his parents, barely hits the parties, and is on track for a fancy college. But when he gets the chance to play on his high school football team, his world suddenly starts to shift. Basking in their recent victory, Vikram and his teammates Diego and MJ attend a party at an abandoned house in the Southern California foothills, located right below three ancient caves. They find themselves lost in the dark of night in one of the caves, carried away by male bravado, with a classmate who has annoyed them for years.
But when the kid emerges with injuries that prove to be more serious than the all-star boys intended, they are suspended for the rest of the season, and the boys’ parents are brought in to manage the situation. As the parents try to protect their boys, they are also managing their own complicated family and professional lives. While the parents work with, and against, one another to figure out the truth about that night, the boys must come to terms with how much of their own secrets they’re willing to reveal to clear their names.
Insightful and deeply human, Our Beautiful Boys is about race and class, parents trying to raise good boys in our fraught times, and the conflict we find when all of these slam together. It’s about the kids inside each parent and the games the world makes each of us play.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Pandya's riveting latest (after Members Only), a Southern California high school is roiled when three football players are accused of assaulting a classmate. Running back Vikram Shastri, a junior and first-generation Indian American, joins the team late in the season and scores two touchdowns in his first game. His celebratory dinner with cocaptains Diego Cruz and MJ Berringer is crashed by bully and drug dealer Stanley Kincaid, who invites the three to a party in a former Native American cave dwelling. There, a drunk Stanley mouths off and lunges at Vikram. He and the others fend off Stanley and leave him in the cave with a split lip. When Stanley emerges later that night, however, he's mysteriously in much worse shape. After he's hospitalized, the school principal begins an investigation and calls in the parents, and the boys forge a pact to stay silent. As tensions ignite between the families along class and racial lines, the boys' pact breaks down and the plot ramps up. Pandya explores the controversy from multiple angles as it affects Vikram's father's chances of moving up at his tech job; mars the reputation of Diego's single mother, a Latin American historian at UCLA; and exacerbates hidden tensions in the seemingly perfect marriage of MJ's wealthy white parents. This is a stunner.
