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, deftly 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.
Loosely mirroring A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, Eddy, Eddy revels in language’s stretch and play, the blessings of story and songs, and the giddy road to adulthood.
‘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
‘Lock your doors, put your phones on silent, and enjoy losing all track of time when you’re introduced to Eddy and his complicated, endearing, off-beat world.’ Emma Neale
Format: Paperback
Pages: 288
Imprint: Allen & Unwin
Publication date: 05/07/2022
Eddy, Eddy
by Kate de Goldi
Review by Harriet
I feel so much love and warmth for these characters and the ways they care for each other. While the novel is tinged with sadness and a sense of shock (both personally for Eddy and communally – it is set in the year following the Christchurch earthquakes), it is ultimately a joyous celebration of language, reading, eccentricity and place. Also, Snorebins!
Eddy, Eddy
by Kate De Goldi
Review by Jack
Adrift in a post-quake Christchurch, 19-year-old Eddy is searching for a purpose: pet minding and a job at the local New World are just some of his attempts to make a life for himself. Despite Eddy’s harbourless wanderings, pockets of intimacy bring great warmth to his story: a needy kid, a swearing Cockatoo, an astute nun, and his enigmatic love interest.
De Goldi’s writing is rich and atmospheric; her characters eccentric and endearing. As you fall deeper into Eddy’s story, you’ll find yourself enraptured by uniquely Cantabrian memories.
This is a wonderfully immersive read – I felt like a character in Eddy’s world, in on all of his jokes, his found family’s quirks. It’s a beautifully empathetic homage to the post-quake generation of teenagers trying to find themselves amongst the rubble.
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