Poignant, raw, and beautifully observed 🧡👨‍👩‍👦. Our Beautiful Boys is an intimate, powerful exploration of family, masculinity, and love. Sameer Pandya writes with emotional depth and lyrical beauty, capturing the quiet struggles and fierce bonds between fathers and sons. I adored the honest portrayal of identity, cultural expectations, and what it means to raise good men. A heartfelt, thought-provoking read.

MJ, Vikram and Diego are riding high after winning a big football game when they hit up this party that goes completely sideways. By the end of the night, the school's resident jerk ends up in the hospital, and nobody's talking about what really went down. Our three "golden boys" get kicked off the team for the season, and just like that, their perfect futures start looking pretty damn shaky. The aftermath is where things get really messy. All the parents come together freaking out about college prospects, reputations, and all that jazz. But as they're trying to damage control, other family secrets start bubbling up that nobody was ready to deal with. Each parent is lowkey having their own meltdown while facing the question nobody wants to ask: do you actually know what your kid is capable of?

Our Beautiful Boys hooks you right away but also makes you think about all this heavy stuff - how race works in America, who gets second chances, and all the BS that comes with privilege, especially for teenage boys. I really enjoyed how the book jumped between all these different families dealing with their own drama on top of their kid being mixed up in this brutal fight. Each family brought something totally different to the story, but they're all asking themselves the same question: "Where did we go wrong?"

An interesting exploration of race and privilege - particularly in the American school and college system. Overall, this was a good read and I liked the different perspectives of each family who were all dealing with their own issues as well as their child's involvement in the brutal assault. However, my only one critique is that it could have been a tiny bit shorter to help the pace, but this did not affect the plot.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the chance to read this ARC.

This book was wonderful. Gripping right from the beginning, it captures race relations in the US so well through the lens of high school football and how the violence on the field translates into violence off the field. But while this is a fairly standard view which equates athleticisms into oafs with brains in their biceps, our three main characters - Vikram, Diego and MJ - are actually quite nuanced. They are high achievers in school, and all fairly privileged by all accounts and not dickheads, they have a sense of social conscientiousness, familial obligations and are navigating the tricky ways of school, bullies and girls.

The humanity of Pandya's writing made me think he was female for a good 50% of the book. This is the highly compliment I could pay a male author. I thought it was a female author who'd just researched NFL a lot. Instead it was a guy hugely tuned in to the nuances of the male experience. On reflection, the women were slightly less well drawn than the men, but only just.

There were riveting twists and the cultural commentary was woven into the narrative with such mastery. A very nice modern take on "boys will be boys." I will be checking out other books by this author. A gem of a find. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC and to Marcy Dermansky for reviewing this on Goodreads and leading me here.

A compelling reflection on what families can look like upon closer inspection.
I liked how the commentary was interwoven into the plot.
Three bright boys have a life-changing experience and their parents’ involvement unwraps many layers.