Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison: book review

Lawn Boy (2018) is set in Washington State in America.

Mike Muñoz, a Chicano Mexican-American boy, is the narrator, describing his life in a dysfunctional family. When he sees a picture of the manicured gardens of Disneyland, he is hooked on lawns.

He dreams of being a garden landscaper, but those dreams seem a long way off when his family are evicted from their rental home and they live in a 1987 Astro van: “I wish I could tell you it was an adventure, at least for the first few days, but it wasn’t. The experience was terrifying from the start.” Weekends were the worst, but the library was open on Saturdays and church was open on Sundays.

He gets a job with a landscaping crew, but is fired. What now? No matter what he tries to do, he can’t get off the bottom rung of life’s ladder: “Clearly, I was the biggest loser ever.” At twenty-two years of age, life is unfair, he is full of self-pity, and he is as mad as heck.

Yes, Mike is an angry young man, but he’s also funny and witty, with an acute insight into class divisions, poverty, and discrimination.

He is offered a job at Chaz Unlimited Limited, a production company making souvenirs—his job is to make nodding bobble-headed dolls. But the view from the window is a lawn, a patch of green. And Chaz has confidence in Mike. Someone believes in him, at last. Until Chaz has a “minor setback.” And then there was Goble: “Whereas Chaz was bullishly optimistic … Goble was calculated. And I guess that’s what unnerved me.”

This seems initially to be a comical coming-of-age story, but it is more than that. It is not only entertaining; it has an important social message.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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