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Summary: A very intreging book of dealing with your past and present!
Review: I began reading this book with an image of what it would be about, and the first few chapters lived up to my expectations. I expected this book to be about a boy mowing peoples lawns and learning about his homosexuality. After the first few chapters, this book took a turn that I was not expecting but throughly enjoyed! This book is about Evan that leads a totally erratic life learning about himself, his 'Gayness', and dealing with his past. The author does a great job merging the present with Evan's experiences from the past. This took a bit to get used to, the jumping from the present to the past, and back without warning. I recommend this book to anyone that enjoys a relaxing smooth reading. You won't be disappointed.
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Summary: Entertaining but unrealistic
Review: I can't say that I didn't enjoy this book; I found it to be well written and entertaining. In fact, I managed to finish it in just under 48 hours. The characters are (for the most part) likeable, the story is enjoyable and familiar to many of us who had confusion about growing up gay and our place in the world, and the author has an interesting style of writing. My only beef with this book is how incredibly unrealistic it was. It was too coincidental that nearly all the characters in this story turn out to be gay; that was a little over the top. I don't know about most people, but I didn't have kids at summer camp coming up to me and trying to initiate sexual relations with me. Also, the author makes it seem that being gay and contracting HIV go hand in hand. By the end of the story, nearly everyone is infected with HIV or have had the majority of their friends die from AIDS. The truth of the matter is that the majority of the population is heterosexual, and less than 0.1% of the population has HIV. Also, the whole drag scene in the laundromat with Hector and Evan felt out of place. I think this scene could have been avoided completely and the novel would have been more enjoyable.
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Summary: Powerful Story, Well Written
Review: I enjoyed this book from page one to the end. Paul Lisicky is a talented writer whose insights into the minds of gay men are extraodinary. This coupled with his excellent writing skills and imagery articulated a story which was compelling and rang true to my life's experiences. A wonderful, thought provoking book. Well worth the read! I'll probably have to read it again.
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Summary: ENCHANTING, MARVELOUS BOOK!
Review: I have rarely been as effected by a work of literature as I was by this book. Lawn Boy is a book that praises the fine miracle of surviving adolescence. Its author possesses the nuance and bravery of a poet (perhaps Bishop?)-- I was charmed. I foresee Lawn Boy's eventual placement within our canon of queer (frustrated and sublime) tales of coming of age. It deserves to rest alongside White's A Boy's Own Story and McCullers' The Member of the Wedding. Bravo!!
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Summary: I heartily recommend you read LAWNBOY for yourself.
Review: I strongly recommend you read this one for yourself and decide what you think and feel about Evan, about Paul Lisicky and about LAWNBOY. I picked up this book when I saw Michael Cunningham's blurb on the back cover -- I was in the bookstore to pick up another of MC's novels, and wound up with two very good reads. By the time I finished LAWNBOY, I knew precisely what it was that Michael Cunningham praised so highly, and found myself in complete agreement. I heartily recommend you read it for yourself and decide. For readers of gay-themed fiction, Lisicky does "re-landscape [the terrain] of American fiction", in a very oblique way. The story in a nutshell is that when the young Evan comes out to his parents, he feels impelled to leave home and begins a picaresque journey to ... well, exactly what, or where, is hard to describe. He starts a relationship, it ends. He goes off to find his brother, he leaves. In the end, it's not so much that he finds himself as his life finds him -- and that's what got under my skin about this book. At the finish, I found myself ineffably sad. In the conventional narrative, the protagonist takes actions that causes consequences that leads to further action. In Evan's life, the actions he takes seem to happen by default, not by design. This is what I found so disturbing, and so true-to-life. As far as the limitations of the secondary characters mentioned in the other reviews, I don't think that's so much a flaw of the writer's vision as one of Evan's limitations, perfectly in keeping with the point of view and perspective of this haunting novel. The other reviewers were also spot on about Lisicky's characterization of the Florida landscape; next to Evan it was the strongest character.
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Summary: interesting read
Review: I truly enjoyed this book especially the ending. He was a very couragous boy. I only have 2 questions, what happen to his brother and is there a sequel?
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Summary: "Lawnboy" is a cut above other novels with gay characters
Review: Lawnboy was definitely easy summer reading. I enjoyed it while I was basking in the sun, book in hand. The book is fundamentally broken down into three sections: (1) the main character living at home with his parents before coming out, (2) living with his older and first boyfriend, shunned by his parents and many others, including the person who's supposed to be in love with him, and (3) post-romance, coming to grips with independence and himself, and starting over. In fact, the book has a strong "starting over" theme prevalent throughout. With each step in the narrator's life, he starts over and grows a little bit each time he does. It's a good coming of age story, even though the characters could have been a little more interesting, and we could have gotten to know them a little better. Having read Paul Lisicky for the first time, I thought his writing and ideas definitely stand out from a lot of the gay fiction that's out there, but I just wanted more development.
Rating:
Summary: "Lawnboy" is a cut above other novels with gay characters
Review: Lawnboy was definitely easy summer reading. I enjoyed it while I was basking in the sun, book in hand. The book is fundamentally broken down into three sections: (1) the main character living at home with his parents before coming out, (2) living with his older and first boyfriend, shunned by his parents and many others, including the person who's supposed to be in love with him, and (3) post-romance, coming to grips with independence and himself, and starting over. In fact, the book has a strong "starting over" theme prevalent throughout. With each step in the narrator's life, he starts over and grows a little bit each time he does. It's a good coming of age story, even though the characters could have been a little more interesting, and we could have gotten to know them a little better. Having read Paul Lisicky for the first time, I thought his writing and ideas definitely stand out from a lot of the gay fiction that's out there, but I just wanted more development.
Rating: 
Summary: I gave up
Review: Maybe it's me, but after reading the first 100 pages, I gave up on this book. The narrator's voice simply did not ring true for me. This inauthenticity stems from the fact that his expressed thoughts and endless self-analysis sound more like a writer's ruminations than the feelings of a 17-year-old. (The problem is even worse when the character remembers incidents from his childhood at age 5 and 11.) With minimal plot development and the only tension coming from cliches, I put it down and couldn't bring myself to pick it up again.
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Summary: Not for Gay Guys Only
Review: One of my favorite chapters in Paul Lisicky's Lawnboy begins "Sometimes I worried that I wasn't a complete person, that I couldn't label myself." It goes on from there to raise fascinating questions about not just gay identity but identity itself, all the "lopsided, parabolic circles" (p.64) one moves in to negotiate the contradictions of the evolving self. I read Lawnboy for a glimpse into the mind and heart of Evan, a gay man coming of age in sultry South Florida, and was rewarded with that and much more. This is a novel of considerable emotional intelligence. It has a great deal to say to anyone--straight, gay, or anywhere on the entire glorious spectrum--with an interest in the mysteries of longing. Lisicky's protagonist grows into his longing as if into his shadow, pulled along by the other compelling characters--his moody brother Peter; his first lover, William, as withholding in his way as Evan's parents, Ursula and Sid; seductive Hector; his one-night stand, Jesus(!). The novel doesn't so much end as unfold with a sense of possibility, with a new love named Perry. As Evan's old friend Jane says, "It's not all that easy to be with someone who's kind. You have to have a certain sense of yourself." Evan gets there by a circuitous route through suburbia, the King Cole resort, the demimonde with its horrifyingly lush phantasmagoria of pleasure and death. Paul Lisicky has such a gift for sensory detail in the service of a good story that you'll be glad you went there too.
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