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Content warning: this article and book series contains spoilers which have mentions of violence, substance abuse, and sexual abuse
The Boys of Tommen series by Chloe Walsh has been viral on BookTok for a while now and it may be one of the best book series I’ve ever read.
I don’t say this about many viral TikTok books. I finished the whole series in about two months, which is crazy considering there are five books each ranging from 400-600 pages. I got so immersed in the characters, their lives, their trials and tribulations that it was hard to put down.
The Boys of Tommen revolves around a friend group in a fictional city in Northern Ireland, with events taking place in the early 2000s. The characters are all between their third and sixth years of secondary school (according to the Irish school system), which means they’re roughly fifteen to eighteen years old. While each book centres on a different couple’s life, the overlapping timeline means that you will end up reading about the same event across some of the books from different perspectives. For example, an event that happened in the first book will be re-told in the fourth book, but this time from the perspective of the main character in book 4.
In other words, the book series looks like this:
- Binding 13 and Keeping 13: Shannon Lynch and Johnny Kavanaugh’s story, 2005
- Saving 6 and Redeeming 6: Joey Lynch and Aoife (ee-fa) Molloy’s story, 1999-2005 (Shannon’s brother and his girlfriend)
- Taming 7: Gerard “Gibsie” Gibson and Claire Biggs’ story, 2005-6 (Johnny and Shannon’s best friends).
While the series is not ending with Taming 7, these are all the books available to read at this point in time.
I had read a few excerpts from the series on TikTok, which at first made me skeptical. I’m wary of New Adult books that read like a Wattpad fanfiction, which was the initial impression I got. After all, the popular jock who wants to protect the young, seemingly helpless girl living in an abusive household is a fairly common trope. What’s more, after reading A Little Life, I was concerned that this would be a variation of trauma porn given the horrific events that take place.
I was – pleasantly – proved wrong.
It was a breath of fresh air to read a book where, even if tropes do crop up, it’s to advance the plot and character development, not just tossed in so that the author can use it to boost the novel’s popularity in the hopes of making it a TikTok viral sensation. But that wasn’t the only reason I loved this series.
In a recent interview with the New York Times in which he was reading a Modern Love essay, Andrew Garfield said, “This is why art is so important. It takes us to places we can’t get to any other way.”
That is what Boys of Tommen does.
This series is devastating, I will admit that. But it’s also a beautifully written story about human suffering that does much more than tug at your heartstrings and leave you up at night wondering what will happen to them next. Similarly to A Little Life, it opens us up to a world that a lot of us – fortunately – will never have to know. It can dramatically shift your worldview in more than one way. Even though the romance story is a significant plot point, there is also a lot of important issues related to class struggle, addiction, domestic violence and child abuse that make you question what you used to know. Reading about Joey’s struggles with addiction, as someone who has been fortunate enough to never have experienced or witnessed that, opened my eyes to how truly complex it is. There are so many factors that can drive someone to that point and for that reason, none of us are in a position to judge someone in that situation. At times, Joey and Shannon’s mother made me both angry and sympathetic towards her situation. It was difficult for me to write her off as a bad mother for not protecting her children because I had to acknowledge that this was a woman who’s been abused herself – since way before her frontal lobe was fully developed – who did not have the financial nor emotional means to get out of that situation with five children, three of them under the age of 10. As someone who hopes to work in the field of gender-based violence prevention, this series let me see first-hand the complexities of abuse.
I only have two minor complaints about this series:
1) Some of the sexual intercourse scenes between the couples felt somewhat gratuitous.
I can understand including sex scenes in general, but I personally do not think that they add much value to a plot, especially in a story like this where the trauma that the characters face is the main focal point. I understand it may be sometimes necessary to show the physical attraction between the characters, but I don’t need to be reminded of that constantly after the first occurrence. I would have much preferred to learn more about the characters’ backgrounds, why they are the way they are, and how they’re going to handle the next hurdle they face.
2) Taming 7 ended somewhat too abruptly.
When I saw an excerpt of the ending scene on TikTok, I initially assumed this was a scene somewhere in the middle of the book. Although Taming 7 is not the final book in the series, it will be some time before we get the next installation. While it did send the message that this is not the end of the story and it will pick up where it left off eventually, I would have liked it to be written in a more conclusive way.
I’m curious to see what the future of New Adult fiction is going to look like, especially with the rapid rise of BookTok that makes it so tempting to produce writing that’s based on popular tropes for the sake of going viral. Overall, I’m hoping that there will be more series like this one. I recommend this book for anyone looking for thought-provoking fiction without delving into the classics.