Lawn Boy (2018) - Jonathan Evison

 

I didn’t realize what a can of worms I was opening up when I decided to read Jonathan Evison’s Lawn Boy. I don’t remember running across it at all when it was published in 2018, and it really only caught my eye now because of its unusual cover art. Only after finishing Lawn Boy, did I learn (in the author’s short essay at the end of the novel) that it is largely autobiographical. This is a book the author poured his heart and soul into, but it came back to bite him in a serious way.

The premise of the novel is this:  23-year-old Mike Muñoz, half Mexican, half white, lives with his single-parent mother and grossly overweight autistic brother in a dump they can barely afford to pay the rent on. It takes every penny Mike and his mother can earn just to keep the family sheltered, fed, and clothed even at the low standards they are forced to accept. Mike’s mother is a waitress who often works two jobs; Mike cuts grass and trims hedges for a landscaping company. Mike, though, despite barely making it through high school, is capable of more, and he knows it. But he can’t stop working his low-paying job long enough to better himself without causing his entire family to crash and burn.

“I read at least two books a week, sometimes as many as four. Call it self-improvement. You see, old Mike Muñoz would like to figure out who the hell he actually is, what he’d actually like to do with his life. He aches to be a winner. I’d like nothing more than to spread my proverbial wings and fly…"

Mike is largely self-educated because he spent so much time in a library while taking care of his autistic brother during the summers before he went to work full time to help support the family.  He wants more for himself and his family, but he doesn’t see a way out of the poverty trap he’s in. And he’s angry about it.

“After all, most of us are mowing someone else's lawn, one way or another, and most of us can’t afford to travel the world or live in New York City. Most of us feel like the world is giving us a big fat middle finger when it’s not kicking us in the face with a steel-toed boot. And most of us feel powerless."

Lawn Boy is Mike’s coming-of-age story, and it’s a fun one filled both with little victories and major setbacks along the way. Eventually, the little victories begin to add up, and Mike starts hanging on to some of the gains he makes.  

Mike’s story, ultimately, is a satisfying one, but I was often distracted by just how super- educated Mike appears to be. One minute he’s quoting Camus while trimming hedges, the next he’s explaining capitalism’s faults to the reader. It’s as if he’s read every philosopher, economist, and historian who has ever put pen to paper. He’s read it all, and he remembers it all. It was a matter of degree for me. I was willing to suspend my disbelief right up to the point that I just couldn’t go any farther and began being distracted by Mike’s amazing breath of knowledge. Then, that was all I could think about every time he opened his mouth.

Lawn Boy, as it turns out, had a rough debut, even being banned in the school libraries of several states because of its sexual content (none of which is really all that explicit). Because one sexual incident took place between two 10-year-old boys, the novel was banned as “pedophilic" by some, “pornographic” by others, and even called “grooming” by a few. The sensationalist Tucker Carlson labelled it as graphic child sex on one of his on-air rants, and from what I understand, Evison even received a few death threats at the height of the hysteria over Lawn Boy.

Having read it eight years after all the stink others attached to it, I find all of this both disturbing and surprising because my only complaint about the novel is how I reacted to Mike’s general brilliance despite him being entirely, randomly self-taught. That distraction led me to experience Lawn Boy as just a pretty good novel, and not a particularly realistic one at that. Evison is a good writer (I’ve read two others of his novels), so I don’t really think he was going for realism. This is more a fable-like story than anything else. And unlike me, you might love it for exactly that reason.

The Reading Week Ahead - March 23, 2026

 Despite having seven books going last week, I still found myself in a bit of a reading slump because even though I finished one of the seven, Ben Bova’s Mars Life, I found it tough to get much into any of the other six at all. The only other one that I found consistently engaging was Ron Chernow’s 1100-page biography of Mark Twain - and I’m going to be reading that one for a few more weeks before it’s done. I find it ironic, too, that the title of the one book I abandoned for good was A Passion for Books, the essay compilation edited by Harold Rabinowitz and Rob Kaplan. 

And, I added these two:

Lawn Boy (2018) is the third novel by Jonathan Evison that I’ve read, having previously read The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving and This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance. I’m near ninety percent of the way through Lawn Boy, but this one is not grabbing me quite the way the previous two did. I’m finding it hard (for reasons I’ll get into later) to buy-into the lawn boy character, and since he’s the main character (as well as narrator) of the book, that tiny bit of disbelief is present on every single page. That’s been a problem.

I expect that just about everyone out there is familiar with the plot of William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist, but it’s been more than 50 years since I’ve read it or seen the movie version. While the plot is not exactly new to me, I find it interesting to see how Blatty builds the book’s tension so effectively by dropping numerous hints along the way of all the dark evilness to follow; and how explicitly he describes all the horrible things that end up happening to the young victim. I turned up my 1971 Book Club edition a couple of days ago and started turning pages. I’m still turning them.

I stalled on Sherman Alexi’s short story collection, Blasphemy, for a while after reading the fourth story in the book, one so sexually explicit that it managed to offend me even at this age. But I knew I couldn’t give up on Alexi, he’s just too good a writer to make that mistake with. I’ve since read three of the longer of the thirty-two stories in the collection, and they are all truly excellent.

I haven’t read much lately of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis or The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie but I still consider them as active reads. And then there’s Chernow’s Mark Twain - that one is starting to seem eternal.

Shy Girl, an AI Generated Novel, Is Being Yanked from British Bookstore Shelves

 

Big Five publisher Hatchette has decided to pull Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl from British bookstore shelves, and will not be publishing the novel in the United States at all because the publisher is now convinced that Shy Girl is largely AI generated. This is a first, but it will almost certainly not be a last unless publishers get more serious about vetting the manuscripts they take on for publication. 

According to accepted AI-detection software, the novel is approximately 78% “machine made.”

According to The Sunday Times (London):

"Hachette picked up the rights to Shy Girl, attributed to an author called Mia Ballard, after it rose up Amazon’s sales chart of horror-fiction after being self-published in February last year. (emphasis mine)

At the time the publisher said it had worked with Ballard on “refining her brilliant novel’, describing it as a “gory horror and razor-sharp revenge thriller”.

 …

According to The New York Times, she said that it was an acquaintance she had hired to edit her original, self-published version who had used the technology."

So there we have it. A self-published novel starts climbing the Amazon charts rapidly enough to get the attention of a major publisher; that publisher fails to do its due diligence and publishes the novel as legitimate; the author blames the scam on an “acquaintance” who helped her out with the book’s editing; the “author” is prepared now to sue everyone involved. 

This is no little thing. This was allowed to happen by a major publisher, and that publisher only took action after the internet was already full of rumors about the novel being an illegitimate one. 

We all know that this is just the barest tip of the coming iceberg of scam writing. Amazon has been terrible for avid readers in so many ways; this is the latest, but it probably won’t be the last.

Mars Life (2008) by Ben Bova

I cut my reading teeth on ‘50s and ‘60s scifi authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Frank Herbert, Theodore Sturgeon, and a few others. Probably because so much of his output was aimed directly at the YA market, Heinlein is the one whose work I remember most vividly today, but all of my favorites had one thing in common: a relatively strong emphasis on the “science” part of the term “science fiction.” And that’s the kind of science fiction I’m most likely to enjoy and remember today even though I do like a well written space opera or alien invasion novel now and then. (My favorite scifi novel of the last few years is Andy Weir’s The Martian, a novel in which the science is almost a main character of its own.) 

Although it’s a little too light on the scientific details to suit me, Ben Bova’s Mars Life does place an emphasis on science over wild fantasy to tell its tale of a Mars exploration mission having to be shut down due to budgetary limitations. It’s come down to a choice of spending money on space exploration or on resettling the millions of people around the world who have been displaced by the rising tides of global warming. Not so hard a choice, really.

But it couldn’t have happened at a worse time for the team on Mars.

A team of anthropologists digging beneath previously discovered  60-million-year-old Martian cliff dwellings has just discovered an actual fossil in what they believe to be a small city located below the cliff dwellings. But that fossil, even with the discovery of an adjacent Martian cemetery filled with the bones of ancient Martians, will not be enough to save the project because the Mars project has more than just money problems - it has very powerful enemies actively working to shut it down for good. As in forever.

The New Morality, a dominant group of religious fundamentalists is so politically powerful that no politician running for office dares run without its endorsement. New Morality believes the type of archeological work proposed for Mars is a threat to its core religious beliefs. If God, or perhaps even another God, created a Martian population and then destroyed it what does that say about their own relationship to God? Is everything they believe about to be proven wrong? New Morality already has ensured that all remaining government funding has been pulled from the project, and now they are intimidating private donors to follow suit.

Mars Life is as much about politics and personal relationships as it is science fiction. It is a cynical look at what motivates peoples and governments and just how fortunate we often are to have a handful of good people turn up in exactly the right spot at the right time when we need them there most. Mars Life is unlikely ever to be considered a scifi classic, but it is an interesting look at what it might be like to be trapped on another planet with only a limited number of people around for support.   

(Mars Life, following Mars and Return to Mars, is the third book in Ben Bova’s Mars series.)

When Writers Are Less Real Than Their Fiction

I have been a reader for over 70 years now, and my opinion of the publishing industry has never been lower than it is today.  I realize this didn’t happen over night, that the industry decline was such a gradual one that its impact is only observable in a hindsight of several years. But sadly, I think we are in the middle of a perfect storm that will continue to degrade the quality of mass market publishing even well beyond the shameful level to which it’s already allowed itself to sink.

Vanity presses have always been around - but they are expensive enough that their collective output is relatively limited and easy enough for readers to spot. Most readers are unlikely even ever to  run across a vanity press product because bookstores seldom give them shelf space. But today, Amazon makes it possible for anyone (and I do mean anyone) to publish a book via its Kindle platform (KDP), plop a generic little e-cover on it, and place it for sale alongside legitimately published books, effectively making it impossible to browse the Amazon catalog in the manner readers used to enjoy browsing brick and mortar bookstores (the very stores Amazon and Barnes & Noble gleefully put out of business years ago). The number of quality books has not increased (if anything it has decreased), Amazon has just made them harder than ever to find in the reader slush pile.

So now, just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, AI comes along and starts doing the writing for us. Just plug in primitive plot, a setting, be prepared to do a little tweaking to the output, and you can write your own novel at the push of an AI button. It has been estimated that something like two million AI-written books are going to hit Amazon in 2026 - and who knows where we go from there? 

I remember a BookBub poll from 2025, that had responses from something over 1,000 writers, in which almost fifty percent said they were using AI in their books. Something like ten percent even admitted that they had done little more than slap their name on the title page of the AI-generated book. Using AI for research, editing, grammar checking, etc. is one thing; using AI to generate whole plots or to do most of the writing is something else. Is it any wonder that the same books seem to be getting written over and over again? Just clone a recent bestseller, tweak it a bit, slap a new purple or pink cover on it, and throw it on the market for the rest of us to sift through. And if that doesn’t work, try again next month.

Legitimate authors, I think, are embarrassed by the state of the industry - even to the point of going out of their way to state that they wrote their books themselves. Not long ago The Authors Guild started offering a “Human Authored” logo for their members’ use, and I’ve heard of others using stickers saying things like “No AI Used,” “Not by AI,” or “100% Human-Generated.” I find it sad that writers have to “prove” their legitimacy this way, but I suspect that this is their future.

My own response to all of this is to read pretty much only the authors I’ve already grown to trust over the years, or to read predominantly from pre-AI back catalogs. Breakthrough writers are going to find me a much more skeptical reader than I’ve been in the past. I may miss out on some good writing this way, but I’m pretty sure I’ll come out way ahead in the long run. Too, I will be a little less skeptical when it comes to literary fiction than to genre fiction - but that’s a whole other discussion.  

Dear Life - Alice Munro

 

Dear Life, published in 2012, was Alice Munro’s last book. She won the Nobel Prize the following year, becoming the first and only Canadian for having done so. At the time, she was called a “master of the contemporary short story,” and I very much agree with that assessment of her talents.

Dear Life contains fourteen short stories, the final four of which Munro tells us are based upon her own life:

“The final four works in this book are not quite stories. They form a separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact. I believe they are the first and last - and the closest - things I have to say about my own life.” (Page 233)

Most of the stories involve small town women whose ordinary lives are forever changed by a chance meeting or occurrence they can never stop thinking about, sometimes even after they are the only one left who remembers what really happened.

In “Train,” my favorite of the stories, for example, a young World War II soldier returning to rural Canada, jumps off the train one town before arriving back in his hometown. He begins walking down the track in the direction he’s come from, and stumbles upon a rundown farm in need of numerous repairs. The woman who lives there alone asks for help, and the man ends up living there for years, never going home. But that’s not even the strangest thing about how their relationship evolves.

In another story, “Dolly,” the pre-World War II girlfriend of a woman’s husband coincidentally shows up at her front door one morning years later selling cosmetics door to door. Lives are changed in ways unforeseen just a few hours earlier. 

Over and over again lives are changed in an instant.

These are stories where sheer chance changes everything for the small town characters involved. Some are led into life-changing experiences by people wandering through their lives on a whim; some are powerfully impacted by the single decision they did or did not make; some wish they had escaped small town Canada when they had the chance; others wish they had never left. The stories are about real people living during and around the World War II years, a time when many were seeking ways to change - or put back together - their lives. It is a time when nothing seems impossible - so chances are taken.

Surprisingly, the least affective stories for me are the autobiographical ones, probably because I could not forget they are somewhere between memoir and short story. As a reader, I found myself wondering over and over where the truth stopped and the fiction began. That is probably not something that will bother all, or even most readers, but it kept me from losing myself in the stories enough to really enjoy them. 

Alice Munro is an excellent short story writer, and I look forward to reading much more of her work. Luckily, she wrote fourteen collections of short stories and one novel between 1968 and 2012. Lots to look forward to.