Kirkus Reviews

“A colorful, bighearted novel about a summer of hauling trash”

In Neville’s debut novel, a youth finds his path while working as a garbage collector.

In 1969, 18-year-old Jesse Wheeler is a graduating high school senior looking for a job in the Chicago suburb of Freedom, Illinois. He finds work manning a garbage truck at Willard Sanitation Services despite arriving late for the interview and getting his car stuck in the company’s gravel driveway. It’s an appropriate position for a guy whose life has been trashed: Jesse hasn’t gotten into college, his father recently died, his mother is moving away, and his best friend just started sleeping with the girl Jesse’s been pursuing all year. Little does Jesse know he’s just entered a new, dysfunctional family made up of formerly incarcerated garbagemen, including the lisping, mocking foreman Billy Bartkowski; the dead-eyed chain smoker and former car thief Grits; a long-haired convenience store robber called Zeus; and a laconic murderer known as Pickles. This unlikely community—which comes to include Grits’ beautiful niece, Iris—proves to have a lot to teach Jesse, who soon acquires the not-exactly-flattering nickname Tippy Toes. The author has a talent for memorable descriptions, as when the crew enjoys a post-work beer: “Billy, Grits and I stood like dirty scarecrows behind the truck. I took a seat on the steel edge of the trough and Grits sat on the curb, his bony knees extending toward the dimming sky like church steeples. Billy turned his orange carry can upside-down and sat on top of it, squashing it nearly in half with his bulk….” The strange milieu and its stranger characters are so compellingly drawn that the reader quickly grows invested. The narrative occasionally lapses into the clichéd and the sentimental, and its attempts to be heartwarming are not always successful. Even so, the reader can’t help but enjoy the ride, flies and all.

A colorful, bighearted novel about a summer of hauling trash.

—Kirkus Reviews