Saving 6

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of physical abuse, bullying, and substance use.

The Boys of Tommen series is a collection of books by author Chloe Walsh. There are currently five published books, with more planned in the future. They each tell the stories of different teenage relationships within the fictional Irish community Ballylaggin, centered around the rugby team at Tommen College—a private school—and the hurling team at Ballylaggin Community School (BCS), the local public school. (Hurling is a popular stick-and-ball sport played in Ireland.)

The first two novels in the series follow Shannon Lynch, Joey’s younger sister. They are titled Binding 13 (2018) and Keeping 13 (2018)—13 is the jersey number of star rugby player Johnny Kavanagh, a boy Shannon meets at Tommen College, Central to their relationship is Shannon’s abusive home life at the hands of her father, Teddy. While Johnny deals with the pressures of athletic excellence and his potential to become a player on the national team, Shannon struggles to fit in after years of bullying and abuse from her peers at BCS. The two fight their attraction to each other for months, convinced that they have too much stress in their lives for a relationship, until they decide to let each other in and use each other as support.

Saving 6 begins five years before the events of Binding 13, as Shannon is still in primary school and Joey starts secondary school at BCS. Walsh introduces events that she only hinted at in Binding 13, such as Darren’s departure from his family at 18 and the birth of Shannon and Joey’s youngest sibling, Sean. While the previous two novels touch on Joey’s substance abuse, Shannon does not recognize the extent of it or the effect it has on Joey. By providing Joey’s perspective in Saving 6, Walsh further explores just how deeply Darren’s departure and being the center of their father’s physical abuse impacts Joey, leading him to turn to drugs and alcohol to cope. 

Instead of serving as subsequent sequels as typical novels in a series would do, the novels in the Boys of Tommen series instead function as concurrent stories. They cover the same periods of time and provide a different point of view on the events that unfolded to further explore the physical and emotional impact they had on different teenagers. For example, Aoife is already a large part of Joey’s life in Binding 13, and Shannon has already experienced bullying at BCS, which is depicted in Saving 6. Walsh briefly mentions some characters—like Johnny, his friend, Gibsie, and Bella Wilkinson—in this novel and then further develops them in the others.

In addition to overlapping plots, the first two novels in the series also share many thematic elements with Saving 6. Just as Shannon struggles to open up to Johnny about her problems at home, Joey follows a similar arc, as he initially fights his attraction to Aoife and keeps his father’s abuse a secret from all of his peers. However, after both recognize the importance of support from others, they better address and cope with their problems. Joey and Johnny’s lives also center on their athletic abilities, as they are being scouted by national youth teams and the stars of their respective school teams. However, they struggle to balance their home lives, their romantic feelings, and the pressure their athletic excellence puts on them—both by themselves and by others. Ultimately, both novels examine internal and external conflicts that impact teenagers as they grow and mature, exploring the liminal space in which teenagers exist as they are on the cusp of adulthood. In following with the two-part Binding 13 and Keeping 13, Saving 6 also has a follow-up novel that concludes Joey and Aoife’s relationship journey—Redeeming 6 (2023).