Endeavor to Persevere is a novel about the year a boy grows up too fast - and for all the wrong reasons. It is a story of immigrant hunger, cheap money, good-faith bad decisions, and the particular exhaustion of a job that slowly consumes you.

Funny where it should not be and honest where it hurts, the novel follows a young man on a factory floor, surrounded by men who have already given their backs, lungs, and best years to the work. What separates him from them is not strength or wisdom, but a single, uneasy fact: he can still leave.

Sixteen years later, the factory is gone. The building has been sold, the machines hauled away to wherever machines go, and the men scattered into other jobs - or into nothing at all. That was the joke nobody told them on the floor: the place they sacrificed themselves for was never going to outlast them by much.

He went in expecting to learn a trade. He learned something worse. It's not easy to be a young man. It never was.

For readers of Charles Bukowski's Post Office and John Fante's The Road to Los Angeles, Endeavor to Persevere is an American working-class novel told from the immigrant side of the door.