Lawn Boy

Blurb

An Amazon Best Book of April 2018: It’s a risky to assume that writers are writing about themselves, that their characters are built on the thoughts and feelings of their creators. Maybe, though, it’s a smaller risk with Jonathan Evison. His novels are generally small-scale and personal: humans tackling human problems, often against stacked odds and with inadequate skill-sets. It’s not that we’re reading about the Evison’s own experiences, but each book is an experiment in empathy, rising or falling with the strength of the connection he forges between his humans and the reader. All About Lulu and The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving are two that work best as both fiction and relatable stories, and his latest, Lawn Boy succeeds for the same reasons those books did. As ever, the story is personal: Mike Munoz is a young Chicano landscaper working in a gated, all-white community near Bremerton, Washington, a few stone-skips from Evison’s own territory on the Olympic Peninsula. His future, at first glance, is not expansive. Munoz seems destined to a life on the margins, hemmed in by forces both external and internal: class and race, bad judgment and resentment. Dialogue is often the strength of Evison’s stories, and there’s a lot of it here—driving the story forward as Mike drives toward a future of his own design, regardless of its uncertainty and imperfections. After all, the best gardens are wild, and a little bit dark. —Jon Foro, Amazon Book Review