American Boy (Watson) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Graceful shifts from observation to insight, capturing the spare beauty of the landscape.
New York Times Book Review


Filled with rugged prose sometimes as biting as a northern plains wind, the next page is as inviting and lyrical as a well-stoked stove. Watson writes of people universal in their flaws and virtues, a community hat cannot be defined or limited to one region or genre.
Washington Post Book World


There’s something eminently universal in Watson’s ponderings on the human condition, and it’s refracted through a nearly perfect eye for character, place, and the rhythms of language.
The Nation


[Watson] spins charm and melancholy around the same fingers, the result a soft but urgent rendering of a young man coming of age in rural America that is recognizable to even those of us who were never there.
Denver Post


Watson will] harvest a bumper crop of readers this autumn.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel


Watson is sure-footed on familiar ground in American Boy.... [He’s] made something of a specialty of that space where teenagers struggle between hormonal urges and moral decisions as they grope toward adulthood.  His evocation of that difficult passage feels as sure as his evocation of small-town life in the upper Midwest more than one generation ago... As convincing as it is lonely and bleak.
Billings Gazette


Watson’s new novel about a young man’s coming-of-age in rural Minnesota during the early ’60s never veers off course.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Watson has penned some of the best contemporary fiction about small-town America, and his new novel does not disappoint.... With his graceful writing style, well-drawn characters, and subtly moving plot, Watson masterfully portrays the dark side of small-town America. Highly readable and enthusiastically recommended.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) Eighteen years ago, Milkweed published Watson’s breakthrough novel, Montana 1948; now the author returns to Milkweed with another powerful coming-of-age story about a teenage boy [Matthew Garth] being shocked into maturity by a moment of sudden and unexpected violence.... Like Holden Caulfield trying to catch innocent children before they fall off the cliff adjoining that field of rye, Matthew struggles to save the Dunbars and, in so doing, save himself.  He fails, of course, but that’s the point of much of Watson’s always melancholic, always morally ambiguous fiction: coming-of-age is about failure as much as it is about growth.
Booklist


Watson's sixth novel resonates with language as clear and images as crisp as the spare, flat prairie of its Minnesota setting....  A vivid story of sexual tension, family loyalty and betrayal.
Kirkus Reviews