This was an interesting piece of narrative non-fiction. An Entertainment Weekly journalist gets an assignment to write about life in small-town America and this book is the result. Valby visits the town of Utopia, Texas, and gets to know the residents and the families that make up this small ranching town. She profiles a larger family, a mixed-race family, and a smaller family, as well as a clutch of older men who gather for a daily round of coffee and gossip in a series of 12 interconnected chapters. Along the way she details how these people and their community deal with the loss of one of their own, the war in Iraq & Afghanistan, raising a family in a small town, and supporting another who has life-threatening cancer. Although this book was set and written about life in Texas, it could as easily have been set in any other small town in America. I found it an interesting and refreshing read.
