WELCOME TO UTOPIA

Entertainment Weekly senior writer Valby debuts with an account of her return to Utopia, Texas, a tiny town she profiled in 2006.

The author starts slowly, but once she gets rid of the early-on clichés (“Roots are rare these days”), she emerges as a sensitive, candid and balanced observer of life in a town that is both everywhere and nowhere. Valby first tries to establish herself with the wizened coffee drinkers who gather daily at dawn to hash over people and politics (only one is a Democrat). She eventually earns unofficial membership among them and is simultaneously drawn to their fragility and rough magic and repelled by their racism and adamantine conservatism. The author focuses on several families and returns continually to update the reader. One woman has three of her four sons in the military, and there is an enormously moving moment when the body of one returns from Afghanistan in solemn procession through town. The author also profiles two unlikely buddies—a young man who has gone off to study at Yale and his ne’er-do-well best friend who remains behind. Valby also closely follows Kelli Rhodes, the high-school’s lone black student, as she finds herself losing academic interest and falling in love with her guitar. (She still graduated second in a class of 12, and Valby publishes her affecting commencement speech.) In between chapters the author inserts sketches of some of the businesses and landmarks in town, including the Lost Maples Café, Erma’s Beauty Shop, Pico Gas Station, the post office and the cemetery.

A compassionate, often wrenching reminder that life is surpassingly hard, even in Utopia.