I think it had a lot of potential but it was kind of tacky a lot of the time and the characters were pretty 2-dimensional. I liked the ending but it dragged on a little bit. Honestly, the whole novel dragged on. I kept falling asleep reading it. With more character depth, fewer blog/social media posts, more concision, and maybe some more character development or a different way of presenting the plot, it could be really good. So like, I wouldn't recommend the book but like, if I saw someone in Barnes and Noble checking it out, I wouldn't go out of my way to stop them (which I've done before to a NYT best-seller so that's saying something I guess) ( )

The Golden Child by Wendy James is a compelling novel with a socially relevant storyline.

Beth Mahony is an Australian ex-pat living in New Jersey with her husband Dan and their two daughters, fourteen year old Lucy and twelve year old Charlotte "Charlie". Beth is a very involved stay-at-home mom who also blogs about her experiences with her family and living far from "home". Beth is shocked when Dan informs her a job opportunity means they are moving back to Australia. The timing turns out to be rather fortuitous since Charlie has landed in a bit of trouble at school after an "initiation" rite with her group of friends goes wrong. She is the ringleader of the group and all fingers point to Charlie as being the instigator of the prank that landed a classmate in the hospital. As the Mahony family uneasily settles in their new life, Charlotte is once again at the center of a serious incident in which musically gifted but socially awkward Sophie Pennington attempts to take her own life after she is the victim of bullying at school and on line.

Beth is surprised at the difficulty she is having settling in after their move. She remains out of sync as she tries to organize renovations on their house along with mothering duties. She is delighted by her burgeoning friendship with Sophie's mum, Andi, but Beth remains strangely dissatisfied with her new life. Until their move back to Australia, Beth has been content to not work outside the home, but that quickly changes after their move. At her mother's urging, she contacts a childhood friend's brother who is in the early stages of running for political office. Happy with her part-time job, Beth is dismayed at the growing distance between herself and her daughters as they spend more time in their rooms than with the family.

After struggling with infertility for ten years, Andi and her husband Steve are new parents for the second time. Unlike her experiences with Sophie, young Gus is an easy baby and she is enjoying bonding with the little guy. With the demands of new baby, Andi does not have as much time for her daughter but she does make a concerted effort to help Sophie become friends with Charlotte. It is not until Sophie's desperate act that Andi becomes aware of the horrible bullying at the hands of Charlotte and her classmates.

Charlotte and Lucy are as different as night and day. Lucy is content to fly under the radar and she has a small, but close-knit circle of friends. She is quiet, unassuming and never gives Beth any reason to worry about her. Charlotte, on the other hand, is eager to be in the limelight and she wants to be friends with most popular girls in their new school. Quickly realizing that spending time with Sophie will socially destroy her, Charlotte ignores her at school yet still remains her friend in private.

Despite being a bit slow-paced, The Golden Child is an engrossing peek into the world of mean girls and bullying. Shifting view points, blog posts, an anonymous website and social media offer an insightful view into the various characters' lives as the bullying attacks on Sophie intensify. The storyline is topical and extends beyond the bullying as both Beth and Andi wrestle with parental guilt once the bullying is exposed. Wendy James brings this character-driven novel to an unexpected and twist-filled conclusion. ( )

Another book focusing on bullying and manipulative children. Ended up scan-reading it... lots of slow bits where I got bored. ( )

Beth’s husband’s job forces the family to move back to Australia. It is not an easy transition in many respects, but their adolescent daughters appear to be settling well into their new school. And then serious allegations of bullying cause Beth to question her assumptions about her children.

I couldn’t really relate to Beth, but I felt strongly about one of the other POV characters, 12 year old Sophie. This is an easy story to become engrossed in. I finished it quickly, and then was left wishing I hadn't read it at all.

It took a while to understand why I felt that way. Was it because it was too dark? But I’d read the prologue before I’d borrowed the book, and it’s apparent from the prologue that something terrible happens.

Also, given that something awful does happen, the consequences are not as severe as they could have been. For all that it claims to be “a novel that grapples with modern-day spectres of selfies, selfishness and cyberbullying”, The Golden Child doesn’t properly explore why the bullying occurs and how those caught up in it move forward. I wasn’t expecting easy answers. I wasn't expecting the characters to deal with the situation perfectly, or even particularly well. But I wanted the novel to engage with contemporary anxieties about young people and social media more thoughtfully. I wanted it to deal with the fall-out of what happens to Sophie more realistically.

I didn’t want it to be a thriller. ( )

Using the philosophy that underlies the advice about ripping bandaids off quickly, I’m going to get the hard part of this review out now: I didn’t like THE GOLDEN CHILD. I wanted to like it. Very much. I have read most of Wendy James’ other books and thought them all very good, with THE MISTAKE having a firm place on my ‘go to’ list of great book recommendations for any sort of reader. I bought this one on pre-order, even before I started seeing all the good reviews it has garnered. But though I kept reading and hoping my dislike was a temporary thing, the book never really grabbed me at all. I imagine the Germans have a great word to describe the particular kind of disappointment that follows the non-enjoyment of a much anticipated book. In the absence of their superior linguistic skills I’ll just say I am sad.

The book – which falls within the suspense genre at its broadest definition – is centred on the Mahoney family. Well the Mahoney women really; engineer Dan Mahoney’s role in this story is to act as the plot device for moving the family from one place to the next. Dan’s wife Beth is the 40-something mother to teenagers Lucy and Charlie, or Charlotte as she decides she will be called when the family moves from the US to Australia where Dan and Beth were both born. Beth has a blog – where she presents an idealised version of her family life to the world – but has not worked outside the home since the kids were born. Though, as she reminds us often, she was not legally allowed to work while they lived in the US, it wasn’t like she chose just to stay home. Lucy, older than her sister by a year, is a pretty average daughter and student while Charlie is the alpha female in any group. Popular. Gifted. Ambitious. Troubled?

Beth makes friends with Andi, mother of Sophie who is one of Charlotte’s classmates at the prestigious private school the girls attend in their new home. Although musically gifted Sophie struggles socially so Andi is keen to help a potential friendship develop and gets the two families together as much as possible. Alas neither Andi nor her husband notice that Sophie is being subjected to more than the usual teenage meanness. She’s being seriously bullied, both online and in real life. Readers see it all along but the fact is only revealed to Sophie’s parents in a very frightening way.

One of the things I didn’t like about this book is its treatment of its male characters. Neither Steve (Andi’s husband) nor Dan have much agency in their own right let alone as fathers or husbands. In a different book written in a different era Steve and Dan would have been the female appendages to more charismatic, important male characters so emotionally stunted and two dimensional were they. I don’t know if this was a deliberate kind of ‘turning the tables’ on gender issues in literature or there wasn’t room to flesh either of these characters out or James just wasn’t interested in their stories but this just didn’t strike me as terribly realistic for a story unfolding in the present day.

Perhaps I would have found this treatment of the male gender more forgivable if the female characters had been stronger than they were. I don’t mean I didn’t like them (that is true but not my point) but that they didn’t develop. Even when their respective worlds fracture neither of the adult female characters changes in any meaningful way nor does any of the deep soul searching that is, surely, to be expected. There’s a fluttering of angst from both and some surprisingly short-lived anger from Andi and then it’s back to the average parenting and self-absorption they were both engaged in prior to ‘the event’.

[Spoiler alert in this paragraph] But the aspect of the book that most disappointed me was its handling of the central thematic issue. The way that Sophie lets on to the adults in her life that things are not going well is a suicide attempt. For some days she lies in a coma and there is uncertainty about whether she will have brain damage even if she does survive. During this period her parents are appropriately angry and vengeful. Her teachers are lining up for a proportionate response and even Beth and Dan are at least slightly invested in doing something about ‘the issue’. But when Sophie pulls through with no adverse health effects things revert almost to ‘normal’. As if nothing had ever happened. Sophie herself appears to have no memory of a suicide attempt (and no mention is made of her having any kind of treatment which in the health system I work in is just entirely unrealistic for a 12 year old who has seriously attempted suicide), both sets of parents appear eager to pretend that everything is fine and the school goes out of its way to whitewash the whole affair. I could have bought one, or perhaps two, of those but the notion that everyone involved is prepared to play make believe just stretched the bounds of credibility beyond breaking point for me. I know it’s fiction but in other aspects – such as its descriptions of the escalating cruelty towards Sophie – the book has presented itself in a realistic style and I don’t think this kind of thing can be turned on and off quite so easily. [End spoilers]

Although its depiction of the bullying teenagers can dish out seems perfectly, and scarily, accurate that wasn’t enough to make this book a good read for me. I thought its characters lacked depth and its story too contrived and unbelievable. For me the central question posed by the book’s premise – how might someone cope when they learn they are the parent of a bully – is never dealt with in any substantive way. However THE GOLDEN CHILD been getting rave reviews just about everywhere but here so, as always, other opinions are available.