geofroggatt's review against another edition
3.0
This book is not for everyone. A book about secretly gay neo-nazis is always going to have limited appeal. Add to this the very explicit racial violence and you know this isn’t going to be an easy read. That being said, if you can accept the necessary (but challenging) violence and racial language, then this is a strangely compelling read. The story revolves around two men coming of age in different eras of Britain’s brash, violent and highly neurotic gay skinhead culture. Schaefer’s debut novel is built on two alternating narrative threads. The first focuses on Tony, a teenager whose sexual awakening occurs at nearly the same time he becomes involved in England’s white-power movement of the '70s. The second thread, set in 2003, concerns James, a young writer researching the very movement that Tony was involved in. Alternating between the two time periods is a revealing conceit: It shows how time transformed skinhead culture from something that was brutally racist to a relatively benign sex fetish. I’ve always been a big fan of novels that revolve around taboo subjects and/or unlikable/dark protagonists, and this novel has both. Immediately we are introduced to Tony, who goes from cruising in the men’s bathroom to committing extreme racial violence and hate crimes in explicit detail. If you can’t get past this first chapter, this novel won’t be for you. We deeply explore the mindset and perspective of Tony, both a gay man and a neo-Nazi, as he explores his life as he navigates both the underground gay scene and the skinhead subculture of London. This book uses these two timelines to explore neo-Nazi subcultures and groups and how they operate and how they’ve changed. This book easily took the reader behind the curtain to show the behind the scenes of people and groups like this, and it did it without glorifying or justifying these groups, while at the same time giving empathy to these characters as full human beings with complexities and nuances. I liked how hypocritical Tony’s gay identity was with his identity as a neo-Nazi, and it was interesting seeing all the places that hypocrisy took him throughout the story, even going as far as having sex with guys from different races despite his beliefs. I liked how this book showed Tony adopting this subculture just as a way to find an identity, and how he was molded more and more by that environment and changed because of that. It was interesting seeing how these different neo-Nazi groups operated, especially seeing how many different factions there were since not all of them saw things in the same way or believed in all the same things. Seeing the neo-Nazi rock and roll subculture and how they operated and advertised themselves was an interesting piece of history. While I did like the idea of two separate perspectives and timelines that intersect with this subculture at the centre, it was not at all satisfying. James’s perspective wasn’t as interesting, and Tony’s was much more engaging and overtook all my interest. While I did like how this book explored a taboo subculture, I thought that it was all very surface level. I would have liked to see more of these characters upbringings and beliefs outside of this underground identity, but all we really got was the idea that this identity became more of a style and that many of these gay neo-Nazi (or just the ones in this story) were just lost lonely boys playing dress up and wanting some sort of real intimacy. I like how the AIDS epidemic was the wake up call that these characters weren’t invincible and couldn’t ignore their gay identity. I liked the small explorations of how gay men can fetishizes their oppressors in order to cope and process, but it was so brief and should have been the main focus of James’s perspective. I liked how Tony and James’s stories intersected, but I was left feeling like I wanted more from it and this story as a whole. I think having more black and Jewish characters in both timelines would have elevated the story and given a full perspective while having someone who existed outside of this subculture and showing how it effected them and their lives. This small change would have been so much more interesting and given an opposing perspective that would give this look at a gay subculture so much more nuance and depth, but the writer doesn’t go there. I also think that we should have explored the darker corners of the gay neo-Nazi subculture, it would have given a fuller picture and shown us that for some men, this wasn’t just a style or a fetish. I’m surprised that I wanted to see more of the hate crimes from the beginning, but I ended up wanting to see how far these gay neo-Nazis would go in service of their beliefs, and I felt like the hate crimes in the beginning of the novel reflected more of young punks and adolescences using racism as a vehicle to take out their anger. In the end, this book felt like it never truly explored its subject matter outside of the main cast of characters, and I think that was a major missed opportunity, but other than that, I liked this book as a character study of two characters in the gay neo-Nazi subculture of London.
bound4travel's review against another edition
2.0
This was a rough one for me and somewhat triggering. The novel focusing on the British Neo-nazis of the 1970/80s was a gritty historical study. There are some very lyrical passages through out the work, but a great portion reads somewhat like a soap opera, with dramatic, sexual interchanges broken up with characters in deep introspection. I didn't find Tony or James to be likable characters, which is somewhat the point, but also didn't find any supporting characters enjoyable either. It left me with a feeling of not really caring what occurred to these characters throughout the novel. I will say that the amount of research completed for this book was astounding and quite impressive.
lizziesharples's review against another edition
3.0
***ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley.co.uk in return for an honest review ***
Whilst much of the subject matter is repulsive, this is well worth reading to understand the duality of being both gay and a skinhead. A precarious position.
The book is fiction however, it is based on the infamous gay Nazi Nicky Crane. The are two timelines one in the 70s and the other in the early 2000s. I really like how the writer has interspersed real articles from magazines and newspapers at the time, as this helps remind you that these ideologies are real and a lot of the events are far from fiction.
Whilst much of the subject matter is repulsive, this is well worth reading to understand the duality of being both gay and a skinhead. A precarious position.
The book is fiction however, it is based on the infamous gay Nazi Nicky Crane. The are two timelines one in the 70s and the other in the early 2000s. I really like how the writer has interspersed real articles from magazines and newspapers at the time, as this helps remind you that these ideologies are real and a lot of the events are far from fiction.
mscott's review against another edition
3.0
Though well-researched, I have to say that I found that this story went on a bit too long. At some point in the nearly 400 pages, I think I ended up losing interest but did want to finish it. The end was quite touching but the story took awhile to get there.
marieke_du_pre's review against another edition
2.0
I read this story full of disbelief, holding my breath and my chest tightening. This dark story about the British neo-nazi movement and homosexuality was way out of my comfort zone.
I swallowed a few times while reading and didn’t know if I wanted to continue. A fourteen-year-old boy trying to hook up with an older man. The next pages a confrontation between Nazi skinheads and Black men seen from the skinheads POV. Teens shouting S*** H*** and N***** go home. So incredibly repulsive.
While reading this story, I didn’t have any peace. I’m not someone who gets triggered easily but this was just ... let’s say it needs a lot of trigger warnings! It’s gritty and dark and there was so much racism and homophobia, I almost got nauseous sometimes. I’m still not sure what point the author wanted to make with this book. The writing was okay, even beautiful at times but the content? I need to have more than just okay or beautiful writing. Not chapter after chapter with events that disgust me. So, I tried and to be honest, I skimmed the second part of the book.
I received an ARC from Muswell Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
I swallowed a few times while reading and didn’t know if I wanted to continue. A fourteen-year-old boy trying to hook up with an older man. The next pages a confrontation between Nazi skinheads and Black men seen from the skinheads POV. Teens shouting S*** H*** and N***** go home. So incredibly repulsive.
While reading this story, I didn’t have any peace. I’m not someone who gets triggered easily but this was just ... let’s say it needs a lot of trigger warnings! It’s gritty and dark and there was so much racism and homophobia, I almost got nauseous sometimes. I’m still not sure what point the author wanted to make with this book. The writing was okay, even beautiful at times but the content? I need to have more than just okay or beautiful writing. Not chapter after chapter with events that disgust me. So, I tried and to be honest, I skimmed the second part of the book.
I received an ARC from Muswell Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
stewarthome's review
5.0
When I first heard about Children of the Sun, I assumed the title was taken from the classic sixties psyche single of the same name by The Misunderstood, but anyone who reads the book can see that it actually invokes Savitri Devi, a particularly bonkers and unpleasant exponent of post-war Nazi occultism, and one of the founding members of the World Union of National Socialists. That said, the focus of this ‘novel’ is very much on English neo-Nazi scum of the Thatcher era; although Devi does appear in extended fictional form, partly on account of the fact that she died in England on the same day that the moronic bonehead band Skrewdriver played their comeback gig in London.
The book intercuts two narratives, which are joined at the end. One is about a lumpen south London secretly gay Nazi skinhead called Tony; and the other concerns the middle-class liberal James, whose family is financially supporting his research into the far-Right, so that he can write a TV script about British Movement activist and amateur porn star Nicky Crane. Schaefer uses the first narrative to undermine reader expectations, his main character Tony is complete low-life, and in every fight sequence I was rooting for him to be annihilated; so it was a major disappointment that this piece of trash survives right the way through to the end of the book.
Read the full review here: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/2782
The book intercuts two narratives, which are joined at the end. One is about a lumpen south London secretly gay Nazi skinhead called Tony; and the other concerns the middle-class liberal James, whose family is financially supporting his research into the far-Right, so that he can write a TV script about British Movement activist and amateur porn star Nicky Crane. Schaefer uses the first narrative to undermine reader expectations, his main character Tony is complete low-life, and in every fight sequence I was rooting for him to be annihilated; so it was a major disappointment that this piece of trash survives right the way through to the end of the book.
Read the full review here: http://stewarthomesociety.org/blog/archives/2782
esperata's review
2.0
This book follows two characters lives - Tony, growing up from the 1970s into the 90s - and James in the modern day, researching the skinhead movement throughout the eighties. The chapters switch between the two storylines, seperated by articles about the relevant movements, until they finally converge at the very end.
For someone interested in Nazism, Fascism, or the skinhead movements, then I'm sure this book would appeal more.
For someone interested in Nazism, Fascism, or the skinhead movements, then I'm sure this book would appeal more.
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