Closed, Stranger (ePub)

Zealand Post Book Awards). Jacqui Colley has illustrated three of De Goldi's books - Clubs, a Lolly Leopold story; Uncle Jack; and Billy, a Lolly Leopold story - and De Goldi's junior novel The ACB with Honora Lee featured drawings by Gregory O'Brien. Her novel From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle won the Esther Glen Award for Junior Fiction at the 2016 NZ Book Awards for Children and Young Adults.

The entry for De Goldi in The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, writing of the debut short-story collection Like You, Really, identifies what were to become vintage De Goldi preoccupations and stylistic approaches: 'The sense of identity through kinship implied in the title is the unifying concern.' Stories 'fluctuate in time' with people 'retold and revisited', in this way compiling the family's history. Indeed, the judges of the 2009 New Zealand Post Book of the Year wrote of The 10 PM Question: 'De Goldi's winning book invites you to become part of another family, to spend some quality time with its members, become engrossed in the family dynamics to the point that ... this family has now become our family, too ... The judges predict, with reasonable confidence, that The 10 PM Question will become an enduring classic.'

The ACB with Honora Lee explores the relationship between a young girl, Perry, and her cranky grandmother, who has dementia and lives in a rest home. As Honora loses words, Perry is furiously gathering them up, and 'it's the intersection between the two which De Goldi plays with throughout' (Waikato Times). A bond forms between Perry, her grandmother and the staff and residents of the home as Perry constructs an alternative alphabet book with her grandmother. The result, Victoria Spence declared in Metro magazine, is 'sheer joy': 'De Goldi's love of language shines brightly, word play shapes many conversations.' North & South concluded that in this 'delicate honeycomb of a book', 'there is not a wasted or insignificant word ... The prose is like music, with rhythms carefully crafted.' The scenario is typical of the so-called 'sandwich generation', but as De Goldi told The Weekend Herald the Christchurch earthquakes coincided with putting her mother into care, which started her thinking about 'cracks in the community and fractures in my mother's head', but also about bonding and 'constructing meaning' from the ruins.