by Madelyn Hutchison
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving Book Cover
New issue, new semester, and new book review. Today I’ll be reviewing Jonathan Evison’s “The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving.”
Author Jonathan Evison was born in California, but moved to Washington at the age of eight years old and is the youngest of five children. He dealt with struggles such as his sister’s death, his parents’ failing marriage, and he was manic. Evison credits his third grade teacher for fostering his love of writing, and telling him to write about his struggles.
Evison’s writing career didn’t take off until he was 40 years old with his debut novel “All About Lulu” in 2008. Since then, he has written six other books and received a plethora of different book awards. Evison also worked on the movie “The Fundamentals of Caring” in 2016 that was based on the original novel.The book follows a 39-year- old would-be divorcee who lost his children in a car accident, and later his wife to another man.
Due to the fact that Benjamin Benjamin (yes, that’s his name) was a stay-at-home dad prior to the incident and in his forties, he had no idea what to do with his life. So, what do people do when their life is falling apart? Try to help others.
Ben takes night classes on how to care for those who can’t care for themselves. After he’s done with the class, he meets a young man named Trevor Conklin, who is 19 years old and wheelchair bound. Trevor struggled from a severe form of muscular dystrophy, which explained why he couldn’t care for himself. Trevor was a ”Type A” person, he ate the same thing every day, watched the same shows, and went out to the movies every Thursday.
Ben wanted Trevor to expand his outlook on life, especially since his own children couldn’t. Then, Ben came up with an idea. Together they created a map of the U.S. and marked any place that Trevor wanted to visit, like the largest sinkhole and Yellowstone.
However, both felt doubtful in the likelihood of this adventure, especially when Trevor became ill and it looked like he wouldn’t make it out of the woods. Trevor didn’t have a good relationship with his dad, who left after he heard about Trevor’s diagnosis.
Over the years his father tried to make amends, but it never really worked. When Trevor heard that his father was involved in an accident, he wanted to visit him in Salt Lake City, Utah. After convincing his mother, Trevor and Ben went on a road trip and tried their best to visit some places that were on the map on their way to visit his dad. In my opinion: I enjoyed this book, because who doesn’t love a chaotic road trip read? I genuinely felt bad for Ben, and was utterly shocked about how his kids passed away.
On the other side of the coin though, I also got mad at Ben because of how he reacted to other situations, and I felt the same way with Trevor. Creating dynamic characters shows the talent of the author, making readers initially like them, and then becoming annoyed by them, only to like those characters yet again in the end.
In short, I enjoyed this book and would recommend it to anyone. This book was written in 2012, and it does say words like the r-word and “Indian” when referring to a Native American person. In hindsight it makes us wince, but there was nothing else I picked up on that might be controversial.
