The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving by Jonathan Evison

Imagine losing everything in one day. One sunny afternoon you are driving home, kids in the back, arguing like little kids do, knowing that when you get home you need to put the groceries away, get the kids settled, start dinner, and maybe if your lucky get five minutes to hear yourself think. Then imagine a careless move on your part, perhaps the car was not put in park and suddenly, instantly, with no rewind button your children are gone and you wife upon hearing the tragic news reacts by leaving you.

This is what happens to Benjamin Benjamin. It is not giving away the plot, as we hear early in the book of the loss he has suffered, though the exact details take time to emerge. In either case the story is really about his attempt at recovery, his pulling himself out of the bottle and trying, and only trying to start his life again.

As Ben had been the house husband while his wife was a practicing veterinarian his job skills are pretty non-existent. On a whim he takes a course as a caregiver and his agency places him with a young man named Trev who has advanced Muscular Dystrophy. Trev is a typical nerdy eighteen year old except that his body has betrayed him and left him in a state of perpetual horniness not just for girls but any reality of a normal life with no real life experience and a bitterness that is ever present.

Eventually and not instantly Ben and Trev develop a relationship that borders on trust and a decision is reached and Trev's mother convinced to allow them to take a trip across a couple of states to visit Trev's father. The boys relationship with his father is poor, the father had abandoned him, and now trying desperately hard to be in his life unsuccessfully he has been in a car accident.

The road trip is the meat of the story. Along the way Trev and Benjamin bond further, learn about idiot lights on dashboards, get caught in an epic dust storm, and pick up a few stragglers along the way. By the end of their trip they have quite a little hodgepodge of family in their van. No one in Evison's world is whole. Perhaps that is the message, we are all broken and gaping in places, it is just some of us that it is more obvious to see. These characters are all presented with large holes for all to see, and the book moves ever so steadily toward some hope of reconciliation, between young boys who will die to young and the vagaries of life, between daughters and fathers, fathers and sons, and between parents who suffered a tragedy none of us can imagine living through.

This book is a winner and when Dot the trying to be tough 18 year old girl on her own hitchhiking has been with the group for a while and at a rest stop takes Ben's hand and tells him she knows " he was a good father" you can feel yourself loving these broken people. But for the Grace of God go I has not been reflected quite so well in a book I have read in along time.

An easy read, a quick read, and a book you will want to keep reading Evison has written a wonderful book here.