Tag: Phil Stamper

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Review: Golden Boys by Phil Stamper

Golden Boys

Phil Stamper

Bloomsbury YA, February 2022

Paperback, £7.99

ISBN 9781526643841

Phil Stamper’s Golden Boys is a coming of age novel that is to the current young adult market what The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants was to readers in the early 2000s. The book is narrated by four young gay men as they embark on an auspicious summer that offers them their first glance of independence and life outside of their small town, before they return to high school for one last year.

The summer certainly expands their horizons, and they are each changed in some way, but the book fell a little flat for me. The first third of the book introduces the characters and the interesting part of the book comes after this, exploring how the boys navigate life away from friends and family. This takes a little too long to reach. It is difficult at times to be able to tell the characters apart, and I would have welcomed some diversity of experience or outlook to necessitate including four different points of view. While an interesting technique, the use of group chat messages to break up the chapters disrupted the flow of the otherwise straightforward and capable writing. I was consistently confused by the age of the characters, who at times seemed like they should be in college, but at least should have been leaving school and going to college to warrant the summer feeling like it has such high stakes.

I hope that readers enjoy the book as an easy summer read, and perhaps relate to the boys’ experiences, but issues regarding pacing and character authenticity and originality unfortunately hamper the book in achieving its potential.

Laura King 

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Review: As Far as You’ll Take Me by Phil Stamper

As Far As You’ll Take Me
Phil Stamper
Bloomsbury YA, 2021
Paperback, £7.99
ISBN 9781526630728

Marty is a 17-year-old (mostly closeted) gay kid from Kentucky with a passion for playing the oboe. His parents are devoted Christians. He tells them he has been accepted to the famous Knightsbridge music academy in London and heads over to stay with his aunt Leah and cousin Shane — but really, he is trying to escape.

We follow Marty as he discovers not just his sexuality, but himself. Even still, As Far As You’ll Take Me is not about self-discovery as much as the discovery of others: that letting people into your life is always a risk, that others will somehow fail you as often as you fail them, but that they are worth it. It is about the reality of love as opposed to the ideal. Stamper’s biggest achievement in this book is to show how love is a kind of effort that we make with people.
Not all the book’s threads quite lead in this direction: in particular, Marty’s relationship with one of his Kentucky friends is not quite fleshed out and feels unresolved at the end. But in general, the book moves with feeling.

The narrative is often light-hearted and full of quips, mostly fish-out-of-water stuff that simulates the experience of an American teenager abroad for the first time. These are funny and give the book a roundedness: there aren’t so many as to overwhelm an Irish reader. The book contains discussions of mental illness, eating disorders, and troubled family relationships — it handles these sensitively and sincerely.

Rory O’Sullivan