Lawn Boy - Hardcover

Evison, Jonathan

3.83

8,206 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1616202629 ISBN 13: 9781616202620

Publisher: Algonquin Books, 2018

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“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 Mu�oz, 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 Mu�oz’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.

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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

About the Author:

Jonathan Evison is the author of four previous novels, including All About Lulu, West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance! He lives with his wife and family in Washington State.

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