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.

Reviews

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, acaustically 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 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 *


Awards
Short-listed for Young Adult Fiction Award 2023 (New Zealand).



Book Information
ISBN 9781910646922
Author Kate De Goldi
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Old Barn Books
Publisher Old Barn Books