Golden by Jade Timms

Title: Golden

Author: Jade Timms

Genre: Contemporary YA

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 3^rd June 2025

Format: Paperback

Pages: 320

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: I play around with the colours for a few minutes, mixing them with the white. The colours I end up with aren’t perfect, but they’ll do. I don’t know why I like pastel colours so much. My life would be easier if I could get into dark colours, but what can I say? My heart is made of pastel confetti.

Golden is a warm-hearted optimistic story about friends and friendship and art and beauty—and the power of letting yourself be loved…

When you work in the juice bar of your small coastal town. When your twin brother is the fun one with all the friends. When something happened a year ago that you can’t talk about, but everything makes you remember it. When it might have been all your fault. When going to the beach, to that beach, takes all the air out of your lungs. When you’re training for the town’s annual Mud Run that you’re not even sure you want to enter. When you’re drawn to colours and pencils and paint, but you’re not an artist. When the new guy in town, the one who makes you feel you’re charged with electricity, seems to want to hang out with you.

When it comes time to let your friends back in.

~*~

It’s been three years since tragedy struck Eddie’s family. Her much-older sister is falling apart, she’s not talking to her twin brother, Pat, and her father is trying to get her to talk. Her friends have all fallen away, and her mother has been living in a different community for the past three years. Eddie is traumatised, but she won’t acknowledge it, and she doesn’t know how to talk apart it. She’s seventeen, and it’s summer. She’s training for the local Mud Run, she’s trying to cope with what happened three years ago, as well as her mother leaving. And she’s not sure who she’s friends with. Ever since things changed between her, Hazel and Pat, things have been wobbly. The only person she’s able to talk to – everyone else wants too much of her. She feels like their demanding too much from her. And Eddie is unsure of how she’s feeling anymore too. During the summer, Eddie will grapple with grief, with changing relationships and new people coming into her life, set in a small coastal town.

Golden is filled with trauma, teasing the threads of dealing with seeing something awful, its aftermath and the responses of everyone around us. Everyone has dealt with grief or trauma, so Eddie’s story is one that readers can relate to, especially if they have been through what Eddie has. It’s a very modern book that young adult readers will relate to with its presence of phones and technology, with its universal themes about family conflict, family separation, and tensions between friends and the changing relationships we all go through in every stage of our lives. These changes often feel more intense as a teen – it’s when we first experience love and attraction, when we might find out we have less in common with friends than we thought we did. Or when we’re not sure where we fit in with everyone in our communities. When talking about things that were traumatic, that we may not have recovered from is hard. Eddie embodies all of these characteristics as she navigates a tough summer. Where new friends Joss and George make her feel seen in different ways. With George, it feels easy. They work together; there doesn’t seem to be much pressure to get too in depth with her. Joss is training with her for the Mud Run so they slowly become friends. Yet is there something Joss wants?

Eddie is wary that people are using her – after what happened between Pat and Hazel three years ago, she feels violated. Like her trust has been destroyed, and nobody has ever listened to her. Or that nobody wants to hear about her struggles. The world through Eddie’s eyes looks fractured and altered as everyone else goes about their lives. She feels alone, a feeling that reverberates throughout the story, as she learns that sometimes, letting people in can help. Everything in this book is carefully laid out and trickles through the story as Eddie navigates one of her trickiest summers yet.

It’s Eddie’s feelings that feel like they are ignored, because everyone wants her to be happy, to get over things and speak. To make them the priority. Only Viv understands her, it seems, which makes sense to me. They have a connection that nobody understands, they feel themselves with each other, even though there are things that they don’t talk about. It’s like they have an unspoken understanding, and I loved that relationship. I felt like it was the best one in the book, the one that felt the most genuine at times, and yet, I also knew things would come to a head eventually. That Eddie would find it within herself to speak to people and get back to where she was – sort of – three years ago.

The current trend in young adult books to explore grief and trauma is powerful. It is important to acknowledge that teens feel these emotions intensely, just like anyone. It’s also important to acknowledge that feelings of trauma and reactions differ from person to person, and when people expect us to react in a certain way, expect people to ‘get over it’ based on arbitrary timelines, or act like they faced more trauma than others, we should be allowed to take our own time to find our way through grief. Golden is also a novel of healing, because it allows Eddie to heal and find her way through what she is feeling, even if it means working out how to open up to people she thought she might never be able to talk to again.

And along with all this, it’s got love, friendship and diversity – Indigenous characters like Joss, and several LGBTQIA characters, which show the world as it is with all its complexities and celebrated differences. As well as the acknowledgement of the tough things in life. The things that make us question what we know and our place in the world. It’s a gentle story with heavy themes that speak to readers aged sixteen and over. This novel was shortlisted for the Text Prize, and I can see why – it is an exceptional glimpse into how one family grapples with grief and change, and what it means when the things you once relied on start to fracture in ways you never think you can get back.

Another great novel from Text Publishing.