Eddy, Eddy (Short-Listed For Young Adult Fiction Award 2023)

Description:

A coming of age story, a love story, an earthquake story and a story of finding your way back from grief.

Eddy Smallbone (orphan) is grappling with identity, love, loss and religion. It's two years since he blew up his school life and the earthquakes felled his city. Home life is maddening. His pet-minding job is expanding in peculiar directions. And now the past and the future have come calling - in unexpected form. As Eddy navigates his way through the Christchurch suburbs to Christmas, juggling competing responsibilities and an increasingly noisy interior world, he moves closer and closer to an overdue personal reckoning.

Eddy, Eddy is a richly layered novel, written with humour and pathos: a love story, peopled with flawed and comical characters, both human and animal; and a story of grief, the way its punch may leave you floundering - and how others can help you find your way back.

Review:

Heartachingly original and quirkily humorous, this Christchurch-set coming-of-age story is a multi-layered masterwork to savour and return to.

A wise and haunting coming-of-age novel populated by authentically flawed characters that command undivided attention... Nuanced and courageous, subtle and intense, with a very powerful, heartachingly surprising denouement, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliantly bittersweet treasure of the kind you'll most likely want to re-read.

* LoveReading *
Eddy Eddy is magnificent. Bookwagon loves the warmth, literacy, emotional awareness, glorious setting and the pure love that exudes from Kate De Goldi's pen. Eddy Eddy is recommended to every older, teen, mature reader, and anyone beyond that. We are so proud to recommend and sell this exceptional novel.

-- Bookwagon * Bookseller *
A quirky, poignant and hilarious coming-of-age novel.

Eddy, Eddy is brimming with humour, lots of which stems from its unusual cast of characters, but also comes from De Goldi's writing, which celebrates the richness and strangeness of language. At the same time, this is a very moving novel, dealing with a number of tough issues. Surely destined for classic status in the years to come.

* Just Imagine website *
Vivid characters in curious situations, but who never shade into caricature. (No. No shy violets in Kate De Goldi's work!)

-- Anne Fine
Eddy is a deep teenaged sigh come to life... With his love of literature and classical music, Eddy is an old soul, but tempered with the right and normal concerns of young people: love, sex, beer, and the teenaged boy's physical inability to give voice to a feeling. Circumstances contrive to make Eddy spill the emotional beans, and there are many of them. If an eddy is an area of swirling water that forms behind an obstacle, like a boulder in a river, then this boy is that. We'll travel with him, whilst he overcomes.

* New Zealand Herald *
A soulfully layered story told with wit and care.

A New Zealand boy reckons with his past and his present ... What follows is an often sweet and sometimes humorous exploration of love, mental health, family, faith, grief, and the past. This sophisticated story weaves in and out of the present day, allowing for a full perspective on Eddy as he juggles reality, responsibility, and hope. Starred Review

* Kirkus Reviews *
Subtle, intense, very funny, and very sad, this is a richly layered novel written with elegance, style and love.

* Newsroom (New Zealand) *
Intense, funny, shocking and exuberant, Eddy, Eddy is a brilliant, rich and effervescent novel about the myriad ways - sometimes right and sometimes dazzlingly wrong - that we find to save ourselves, when, like Eddy, the plates shift underneath our feet and the chasm opens.

-- Ursula Dubosarsky
Eddy is a conundrum. A sweet 19-year-old soul, brought up by his Uncle Brain (yes,Brain), recently bereaved of their dog, Marley. Stuff is going on for Eddy: some kind of catastrophic exit from his Catholic high school, a caustically clever but needy best friend in Thos More, a series of unsatisfactory jobs. Eddy is a deep teenaged sigh come to life. Eddy is an orphan, his father Vincent having died from a drug overdose and his motherethereally elsewhere. Brain is his rock, but Eddy is at the age of irritation, and dear,patient, cerebral Brain is his major irritant. The love between the pair is palpable, and the makeshift family of Brain and his friendsalong with the Modern Priest (a teacher with whom Eddy clashed at school, andpointedly ignores at home) is unconventional, and a rich seam of humour. Eddy finds great comfort in animals; he's good with them, and his pet minding businesssoon takes off as owners recommend him. This leads Eddy to becoming more than just adog walker to one family as their complicated set of circumstances mean they come torely on him, and in a way, he on them. Kate de Goldi has a facility for, and no doubt fascination with, rich language and thisplays out through Eddy, influenced by Brain. With his love of literature and classical music, Eddy is an old soul, but tempered with theright and normal concerns of young people: love, sex, beer, and the teenaged boy'sphysical inability to give voice to a feeling. Circumstances contrive to make Eddy spillthe emotional beans, and there are many of them. If an eddy is an area of swirling water that forms behind an obstacle, like a boulder in ariver, then this boy is that. We'll travel with him, whilst he overcomes.

* New Zealand Herald *
Eddy, Eddy is a complex, layered and highly entertaining novel for YA readers. Set in the aftermath of the New Zealand earthquakes it appears at first to be the story of teenage rebellion and disenchantment but as we get to know Eddy and his world, we uncover a much more nuanced picture of a boy growing into a man, affected by trauma but anchored by his found family and the many bonds that tie them together.

Eddy's caregiver is his uncle Brain who adopted him as a tiny child and whose interest in words and poetry, in drama, music, religion, and baking grate on Eddy's nerves as he grapples with his own identity and his past. Eddy has left his much-hated school and immersed himself in a complex web of jobs looking after an increasing number of strange pets - and eventually people. This is a love story in the traditional sense as Eddy reconnects with an old girlfriend, but it is also a love story for lost childhoods and past memories as well as a recognition that love comes in many forms. The book is threaded through with musical and literary references as well as a depiction of post-earthquake Christchurch which is at once dystopian and very realistic. There are some very adult themes and a very real investigation of both self-destruction and self-harm which is not for the faint hearted. Every character has depth and no-one is perfect, especially Eddy who has to come to terms with himself and his past experiences in order to move his life from darkness to light.

What really carries this novel forward though is the dextrous wordplay and the clever juxtaposition of the darkly humorous and the refreshingly sentimental, it's a novel of many shades with love and kindness at its very lovely heart.

5* review

-- Louise Johns-Shepherd * Books for Keeps *

Prizes: Short-listed for Young Adult Fiction Award 2023 (New Zealand). Long-listed for UKLA Book Awards 2025 (UK).

Author Biography: New Zealand author Kate De Goldi first came to the attention of the UK reading public with The 10PM Question, a New Zealand Post Book of the Year. She is a literary superstar in her homeland, winning many awards for her writing for both children and adults, and reviewing and teaching creative writing.