STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES - FLUSHBOY

Synopsis/blurb.........

So there's video footage of me not washing my hands in the bathroom at work. My dad says it's the kind of the thing that can tank his whole business. That he has to be extra careful. Don't I understand?

Usually when he's spewing all this, I just stand there.

Last week I was his show-and-tell for Sunday school class. We wore matching ties, and I was under strict orders not to smile or look sly. Some of those people were his customers, after all.

I don't know.

Anyway, bam, yeah, the camera caught me: I ran the water but didn't wash my hands.

Over the course of one shift working the window of his father's drive-through urinal, our sixteen-year-old Flushboy will have to not only juggle gallons of warm pee and deal with the worst flood ever (it's not water), but he'll also have to fend off the urine mafia, solve the citywide mystery of Chickenstein, and win his girlfriend back.

"My hat is off to Stephen Graham Jones, because he is the kind of author that makes the frustrated writer inside every book reviewer cringe with self-doubt."—PopMatters

Stephen Graham Jones is the author of ten novels, three collections, and one novella. He is a full professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and in the low-residency program for University of California Riverside—Palm Desert. Stephen is forty-one, and married with children.

What on earth was I thinking?  A book cover with a toilet on and the title Flushboy......and the premise of a 16 year old boy, working at his dad’s drive through urinal. Not sure which part of my brain thought this would be a compelling read.

It wasn't. I don’t doubt the author can write entertaining books, I just don’t think they are entertainment for me.

I wasn't put off by the mechanics of the customer’s usage of the John and Jane cups provided at our innovative business, just bored and indifferent to events due to a lack of empathy for our 16 year old hero.  

Mercifully short at 160-odd pages long, but in my opinion could have been vastly improved by everyone in the book drowning in a tank of urine in the first 10 pages, followed by 150 pages of anything else.......doodles, cartoons, recipes, photos of toilets, anything.

2 stars from 5..........why not a 1? He can write and he deserves a star for at least producing something original if not something I enjoyed.

I might have been better served by reading his Zombie Bake-Off or more likely Growing Up Dead in Texas.

Accessed from Net Galley........something I brought upon myself.