October 1, 2024
Pandya (Members Only, an NPR Books We Love pick) examines race, class, and privilege when three star players on a high school football team are accused of attacking a teammate and are suspended. As the parents try to protect their children and determine the truth about what really happened that night, they find there are more secrets to uncover. Prepub Alert.
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Starred review from March 1, 2025
If not for the alcohol and adrenaline, Vikram, Diego, and MJ might have sensed school bully Stanley's sadness at the party after the football team's triumphant win. But in Pandya's (Members Only, 2020) remarkable novel about race, privilege, and masculinity at a California high school, Stanley ends up hospitalized, and Vikram, Diego, and MJ, the football team's star players, are suspended, jeopardizing their college prospects. The boys clam up, and relationships falter as their parents, who have their own secrets, scramble to protect them. Pandya avoids clich�, going to the heart of each character's humanity, uncovering the permutations and inconsistencies of identity and privilege. For example, Diego's friends, "the Oaxacans," joke about his "deep bougie status," an advantage of his mother's successful academic career researching the slave trade in Brazil. Vikram's mother worries he will take the fall, being neither white like MJ, nor brown in the way Diego is. Our Beautiful Boys is a moving, suspenseful portrayal of young men pushing past the bounds of "all the people that had come before" on the complicated playing field of American identity.
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