THE GREAT GODDEN

A London teen recounts the summer that tore the family apart.

Every summer, a White English family with four children holidays at the father’s inherited seaside home. Because the father’s cousin, Hope, and her longtime Scottish partner, Malcolm, stay a few doors down the beach, the entire family is in and out of each other’s houses and lives. Their days have always been filled with sailing, tennis, horseback riding, and jovial dinners, making summer an idyllic time for all. Until this summer. The narrator—the oldest child and an unnamed, ungendered teen with plans to go to art school soon—recalls the insidious transition when teenage Kit Godden, the offspring of a legendary bronze-skinned Hollywood actor, and Hugo, his slightly younger brother, stay with Hope and Mal as the couple plans their end-of-summer wedding. While Hugo seems to lurk in corners, golden-skinned Kit, with “hair like Medusa’s snakes,” ingratiates himself with the family, starting a controlling relationship with the narrator’s 16-year-old “sex goddess” sister and stirring conflicting, sometimes lustful, emotions in the narrator. Through the narrator’s keen observations, made more poignant in hindsight and through sarcasm, readers view the twisting and turning development of Kit’s manipulation. Although slim, Rosoff’s taut, psychological story elicits a slow burn, leaving readers wondering how far and wide Kit’s power will extend through the family. It’s all just the beginning of the narrator’s loss of innocence.

A searing coming-of-age novel.