The book’s novelistic terrain will be all too familiar to anyone who grew up in a small town in the Southern U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. Readers first meet Liam, the youngest of the four Menschen kids. Their mother, Vivian, was a Marlowe, a firmly rooted family whose members were considered local gentry. They all live at the family plantation home, Vale Hollow, in Lawton, Tennessee. Dad is Franklin Menschen, and he writes the annual Christmas letter—always showing the family in a positive light—which in some ways is the foil to Liam’s account of events. (With wicked innuendo, Liam makes the point that if you’re a well-mannered white boy in this town, the cops will cut you some slack, no matter how many laws you break.) The novel’s pages are suffused with the usual melodrama of growing up and figuring life out. The book has plenty of tragedies as well: classmates killed in car crashes or in stupid pranks gone wrong. But for the most part, these are basically good kids; they succeed, go to college, marry, and find decent jobs. In the last chapters, Liam is happily married and an expecting grandfather, while Vivian and Franklin have passed away after lives well lived. For these fictional small-town folks, high school and college friends die in middle age, reunions get thinner and thinner, and memories eventually dim. This is an easy book to like. The Christmas letter as foil is a bit exaggeratedly sugarcoated, but it’s not as if Liam and his friends try to counter the letters’ idealized familial portraits; their youthful sins are venial, not mortal. The letters themselves, thank goodness, are not full of the obnoxious bragging that invites parody. One also wonders why Duning decided to cast the book as fiction when it’s so obviously his own life story, including what must be Duning family photographs; presumably, he wanted the cachet of good ole boy storytelling and perhaps license to stretch things once in a while. But Duning is a compelling, colorful prose stylist—so wherever he goes, readers will surely be happy to follow.