Banned Book Review: “Lawn Boy” by Jonathan Evison
“Eh… it was ok. Controversy aside… this story was only mildly interesting.”
“I read this because it is a book that parents in my school district are protesting. I gave it a three star review because it was right down the middle for me. Decent writing, sweet ending, and I don’t know that I would’ve picked it out or kept reading it without the local issues around the book.”
The quickest road up the bestselling book charts is getting a book that wouldn’t have earned a second thought from most of us banned across a dozen or more USA states’ school boards.
Mike Muñoz’s fictional diaries read like a day in a life rantings on Reddit or a pre-Elon Musk Twitter. Some guy grew annoyed with his low income job again. His mother works too much to make the household financial puzzle pieces fit. Caring for his disabled brother is placing a toll on him. Reading old literary works provides the intellectual stimulation he craves. Poverty has not left America from the times of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, a book Mike relates to. It shape shifted into this century.
Now say those fine points on repeat in a plot that feels like it happens a little too slowly in real time. Yes, at the pace of you walking around running errands and every tiny verbal encounter documented. This isn’t to say that Lawn Boy is a poorly written book, but exciting? You can set this down on the airplane and come back from a quick restroom trip not feeling like you missed much. Or missed anything.
“Maybe something interesting happens later in the book but good lord... making me wait several chapters to get into any sort of plot? That’s not for me.”
The private act depicted in the story was hardly described in detail or at much of a word count, by two consenting same aged fictional young people as many a heterosexual major film or book has done. A few sentences and a few rephrasing of them will get your book banned if LGBTQ. People walking past this book at the school library or bookstores learn about private things far more detailed from peer groups, the web, television, the media and cinema. You’ve read the things depicted in this story in so many youth novels and twenty something reads. What makes this different? The plot gets 1% LGBTQ.
A further point we culturally ignore: why aren’t we talking about all private heterosexual acts depicted in popular media with young people? Shouldn’t all books be treated, or mistreated, equally? Young people learn about when things become assault from our role models at school and home and what is or is not age appropriate.
These parents leaving this book alone on the shelves had little to worry about. I am not the target audience for this book. Your young adult at home is not any more than I am. In 2023 with social media making attention spans shorter by the day, how this very wordy novel for the little that happens in it got published without editing down anything is implausible. I ask again. Who is this book for? Honestly, I don’t know. I wouldn’t throw it into the beach reads category or to-read recommendations after heavy hitting like great literary works of the past. You feel like this is someone’s unedited journal that really needed a good trimming for keeping the emotions going. The charming bits are sandwiched between too much to get there.
The everyday feel of this book is interesting reading it as a work of artistic expression as one might walk around a modern art museum browsing the ideas of contemporary works you cannot figure out in the first seconds. The book fans downloading this book biting their fingernails in anticipation are expecting a novel. And the problem: this ain’t literature. It’s art. Enjoyable art, served up with words as the paint and the book binding as the easel. An average writer can’t achieve writing as art, congratulations to Mr. Edison on that, but what makes the book so unique to me is why I could see this being a let down to people who aren’t expecting that. Would you, reading the mass media hysteria around the book’s ban, know that this book isn’t really a regular book in the storytelling?
Lawn Boy is about a PG-13 level of age maturity. Private acts don’t get mentioned in detail, or as often, as they do in heterosexual young adult novels. In a memory of his first time with a girl, the protagonist leaves it to a tame retelling of she quickly takes off her clothes and an interaction with a man as a consenting adult gets brushed off as “I won’t bore you with the particulars.”
As a parent, you should be reading the same books and publications your teens go through anyway and discussing them together: this book, Cosmopolitan, The Hunger Games, it doesn’t matter. What may be problematic for younger readers is the large amount of cursing and details you could do without. An unnecessarily long passage about picking up dog mess needed few sentences for the story advancing. The book is rough around the edges when it isn’t cursing. A rude, sometimes kind, grandmother possesses the 23 year old lead character’s soul for much of the book.
“So, here I am on Thanksgiving, eating a turkey leg. Except this time I’m not on the crapper…”
“Believe me, it would have been easy to eat four Advils and stay in bed all day. But I got dressed and left without eating breakfast or even going in the house. By afternoon, with my loose tooth still throbbing ceaselessly, I put in job applications at KFC, Payless ShoeSource, and Taco del Mar.”
Flea markets mean trouble. What if someone reading Lawn Boy learned what flea markets were and went to one? ;)
“So I bought a seven-dollar bottle of wine from Albertsons, along with some lunch meat, some bread, some cheese, and a couple of nonorganic Honeycrisp apples. I made sandwiches and cut them up into dainty squares, and sliced up the apples, and brought two mugs and some napkins and a bottle opener from home. I packed it all in the closest thing I could find to a picnic basket: the green tackle box I’d bought at the flea market.”
The book might be so much cooler if the author wrote things up like the afterword section.
“With this novel, I wanted to wake up the moribund American Dream, grab it by the collar, and splash some water in its face. Or better yet, invent a new American Dream, one not beholden to the tenets of capitalism, or identity politics, or any measure but the human will to invent ourselves as we wish.”
He talks about his own life growing up with poverty, being a real lawn boy, growing up around these folks depicted in the novel and feelings towards money. Beautifully. In sadness. Honestly. This was the book I wanted to read. Where was it all those pages ago? Where was the introspective on being a young yard man and classism the author really went through? The intense feelings of LGBTQ life thrown at us? I sat through a book waiting for the therapy sessions spilled on the page. An infamous BANNED BOOK.
What you get.
“At the Verizon store, there was a guy with Sheetrock dust in his hair and another guy with paint on his jeans, both in line in front of me. And of course, there was also the obligatory old lady who needed instructions for unlocking her screen. I waited forty-five minutes. When I finally got to the counter, they tried to give me a new phone at “no charge.” But I’m not as stupid as I look. I knew there’d be all kinds of strings and data packages attached, so I told the guy no thanks, I just want minutes. But I was eligible for an upgrade, he said. I don’t want an upgrade, I told him.”
Come on. You clicked on my review for the scandalous stuff. YOU MUST KNOW. URGENTLY! Being LGBTQ is boring, everyday life. So normal, it becomes too much to handle. Brace yourselves for what I am about to copy/paste.
““Mom, maybe you oughta sit down,” I said at last.
She paused in her scrubbing. “Michael, what’s wrong?”
“Well, uh, it turns out that, well . . .”
“That what?”
“Mom, I’m gay.”
Visibly relieved, she resumed scrubbing the mirror. “Oh, thank God. I thought you had a tumor.””
I sit here today discussing an ordinary book I, and plenty of people, wouldn’t have read without it being banned. Your average teen is going to hold this off for another decade in preference of Sweet Valley High’s Fault in Our Wizarding World Stars as We Compete for Maze Running Cheerleading Tryouts. With how no one reads anymore, maybe another scroll through TikTok dance trends. Lawn Boy is out there topping the charts and getting global media attention. Hey, it’s gotten my attention away from 19th century horror to review this. Do you see what book banning does, everyone?
“Unfortunately, in the case of book banners, none of them have read it. 99.8% of them literally read the one out-of-context passage.”
