“Jonathan Evison's voice is pure magic. In Lawn Boy, at once a vibrant coming-of-age novel and a sharp social commentary on class, Evison offers a painfully honest portrait of one young man's struggle to overcome the hand he's been dealt in life and reach for his dreams. It's a journey you won't want to miss, with an ending you won't forget.”
—Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale**
For Mike Muñoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work—and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew—he knows that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how?
In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man on a journey to discover himself, a search to find the secret to achieving the American dream of happiness and prosperity. That’s the birthright for all Americans, isn’t it? If so, then what is Mike Muñoz’s problem? Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can’t seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it. And it’s looking really good.
Lawn Boy is an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, about overcoming cultural discrimination, and about standing up for oneself.
**
Amazon.com Review
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
From School Library Journal
Eminently readable and deeply thought-provoking, Evison's deceptively simple novel takes on tough issues such as race, sexual identity, and the crushing weight of American capitalism. Mike Muñoz, the 22-year-old biracial (Mexican and white) narrator, has grown up dirt-poor with his hardworking waiter mother and his brother, who is developmentally disabled. The narrative follows Mike's attempts at several other jobs after he's fired from his lawn-mowing gig while he works on his love life and tries to help out his family. After Mike recounts a great disappointment involving his biological father in the first chapter, one of several themes emerges as Mike encounters several potential father figures (often bosses), each with his own deeply flawed philosophy of life. From the cutthroat capitalism of his first boss to the upper-class cronyism of an old high school pal, each man personifies aspects of Mike's life that he cannot stand, even while he learns valuable lessons from them. Meanwhile, other story lines fix on Mike's underdeveloped understanding of his sexuality, which is not helped by the rampant homophobia and sexism of his best friend, and his equally conflicted understanding of his ethnic identity. Unfortunately, Evison's often infective enthusiasm for his preponderance of ideas weighs down the demands of the plot. Nevertheless, the passion with which Mike and Evison share these ideas redeems the novel. VERDICT Give this flawed but exciting coming-of-age story to teens eager to engage with heavy and timely political issues.—Mark Flowers, Rio Vista Library, CA
Description:
“Jonathan Evison's voice is pure magic. In Lawn Boy, at once a vibrant coming-of-age novel and a sharp social commentary on class, Evison offers a painfully honest portrait of one young man's struggle to overcome the hand he's been dealt in life and reach for his dreams. It's a journey you won't want to miss, with an ending you won't forget.”
—Kristin Hannah, author of The Nightingale**
For Mike Muñoz, a young Chicano living in Washington State, life has been a whole lot of waiting for something to happen. Not too many years out of high school and still doing menial work—and just fired from his latest gig as a lawn boy on a landscaping crew—he knows that he’s got to be the one to shake things up if he’s ever going to change his life. But how?
In this funny, angry, touching, and ultimately deeply inspiring novel, bestselling author Jonathan Evison takes the reader into the heart and mind of a young man on a journey to discover himself, a search to find the secret to achieving the American dream of happiness and prosperity. That’s the birthright for all Americans, isn’t it? If so, then what is Mike Muñoz’s problem? Though he tries time and again to get his foot on the first rung of that ladder to success, he can’t seem to get a break. But then things start to change for Mike, and after a raucous, jarring, and challenging trip, he finds he can finally see the future and his place in it. And it’s looking really good.
Lawn Boy is an important, entertaining, and completely winning novel about social class distinctions, about overcoming cultural discrimination, and about standing up for oneself.
**
Amazon.com Review
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
From School Library Journal
Eminently readable and deeply thought-provoking, Evison's deceptively simple novel takes on tough issues such as race, sexual identity, and the crushing weight of American capitalism. Mike Muñoz, the 22-year-old biracial (Mexican and white) narrator, has grown up dirt-poor with his hardworking waiter mother and his brother, who is developmentally disabled. The narrative follows Mike's attempts at several other jobs after he's fired from his lawn-mowing gig while he works on his love life and tries to help out his family. After Mike recounts a great disappointment involving his biological father in the first chapter, one of several themes emerges as Mike encounters several potential father figures (often bosses), each with his own deeply flawed philosophy of life. From the cutthroat capitalism of his first boss to the upper-class cronyism of an old high school pal, each man personifies aspects of Mike's life that he cannot stand, even while he learns valuable lessons from them. Meanwhile, other story lines fix on Mike's underdeveloped understanding of his sexuality, which is not helped by the rampant homophobia and sexism of his best friend, and his equally conflicted understanding of his ethnic identity. Unfortunately, Evison's often infective enthusiasm for his preponderance of ideas weighs down the demands of the plot. Nevertheless, the passion with which Mike and Evison share these ideas redeems the novel. VERDICT Give this flawed but exciting coming-of-age story to teens eager to engage with heavy and timely political issues.—Mark Flowers, Rio Vista Library, CA