A follow-up to the author’s award-winning The Girls, this book follows the lives of four boys with very different interests and racial identities. One of them is the son of two moms in The Girls; this isn’t stressed, but the moms are in one scene, checking on their son in his room. We watch the boys in childhood as they become friends, then drift apart as they develop separate interests and sometimes compete with each other. “For a little while the boys enjoyed standing out on their own,” we read. Yet “without the others, each of the boys soon felt as though he had been swept out to sea…. The boys knew they had to be able to talk about their feelings… but it wasn’t easy.”
Eventually, though, they realize that patience and kindness could bring them back together, even as each charted his own path. The boys, now men, learn to support each other when one needs help. We also see one of the men marrying and starting his own family with another man. A final scene shows them all playing together with their own children. This is a lovely and perfectly understated examination of masculinity and friendship. Read it with the boys in your life.
Not yet available in the U.S., though may be bought directly from the U.K.
