Golden Boy

Golden Boy, by Abigail Tarttelin

Trigger warning: rape

I loved this book about an intersex English teenager. Max Walker is his family's golden boy, but he and his family are harboring a secret. His parents Karen and Steve are successful attorneys, and Steve is eyeing an MP vacancy, so there's good reason to keep things covered up. His younger brother is definitively NOT the golden boy, but he has a sweet relationship with Max anyway.

But when Max has a horrific encounter with a boy from his childhood, everything shifts and the secrets begin to leak out.

Abigail Tarttelin is a young actor and novelist who is the crazy talented type who drives my husband crazy. She moved to London at age 19 to attend university but "sacked it off after a month because she had too much free time and it wasn’t fun enough," as she says on her Web site. In 2013 the London Evening Standard named her as one of the most powerful 25 people under 25 in London, and Golden Boy has won an American Library Association ALEX Award and was shortlisted for a LAMBDA Award for Best Debut LGBT Fiction.

This book is painful, poignant, and beautiful, and is an artful and sensitive depiction of sexual orientation and intersex issues. Read it! This is an author to follow!