A review by stephen_coulon
Don't Skip Out on Me by Willy Vlautin

4.0

The story follows a sensitive orphaned teen from Nevada who abandons his life as a shepherd to seek fame in the world of professional boxing. Vlautin’s style reads like Hemingway except without the nihilism and chauvinism (though it’s not nearly as poetic); the prose is straightforward and lucid; the approach is earnestly sincere, and it is refreshing to meet some characters who unironically follow an admirable moral code. This novel projects a believable dichotomy of good vs. evil in a realistic contemporary setting, perhaps because it avoids sentiment in its brutal depiction of poverty and loneliness. By saving its romanticism for its heroic characters alone it capably develops some admirable and creditable examples of the Hemingway “code hero”. I’ll be reading more Willy Vlautin soon.