(4.5 stars) Four childhood friends from Little Wing, Wisconsin; four weddings but no funeral – though there are a couple of close calls along the way. Which bonds will last, and which will be strained to the breaking point?

Henry is the family man, a dairy farmer who married his college sweetheart, Beth, and has two kids. Lee* is a musician, the closest thing to a rock star that Little Wing will ever produce. He became famous for Shotgun Lovesongs, a bestselling album he recorded by himself in a refurbished chicken coop for $600, and now he lives in New York City and hobnobs with celebrities. Kip gave up being a Chicago commodities trader to return to Little Wing and spruce up the old mill into an events venue. Ronny lived for alcohol and rodeos until a drunken accident ended his career and damaged his brain. He’s still Lee’s biggest fan.

The friends have their fair share of petty quarrels and everyday crises, but the big one hits when one guy confesses to another that he’s in love with his wife. Male friendship still feels like a rarer subject for fiction, but you don’t have to fear any macho stylings here. The narration rotates between the four men, but Beth also has a couple of sections, including the longest one in the book.

This is a book full of nostalgia and small-town (especially winter) atmosphere, but also brimming with the sort of emotion that gets a knot started in the top of your throat. All the characters are wondering whether they’ve made the right decisions, whether they’ve gotten stuck in a life smaller than the one they intended or traded home and comfort for fame. There are a lot of bittersweet moments, but also some comic ones. The entire pickled egg sequence, for instance, is a riot even as it edges towards tragedy.

I’d liken this to a cross between Kitchens of the Great Midwest and Daisy Jones and the Six. I’d read two Butler books before, Beneath the Bonfire and Little Faith, but this blows those two out of the water. I have just one of his books remaining, The Hearts of Men, which is on my Kindle. This only narrowly misses out on a full 5 stars from me because I felt like Kip was less than essential.

*Apparently based on Bon Iver (Justin Vernon), whose first album was a similarly low-budget phenomenon recorded in Wisconsin. I’d never heard any Bon Iver before and expected something like the more lo-fi guy-with-guitar tracks on the Garden State soundtrack. My husband has a copy of the band’s 2011 self-titled album, so I listened to that and found that it has a very different sound: expansive, trance-like, lots of horns and strings. (But NB, the final track is called “Beth/Rest.”)

Favorite lines:

Kip: “The sense that staying in town meant we were failures, meant we were yokels—who the hell knows what we thought back then on those nights. … Feeling like we were apart from everything we’d ever known and maybe better than the place that made us. And yet, at the same time, in love with it all. In love with being small-town kings, standing up on those bankrupt towers, looking out over our futures, looking for something—maybe happiness, maybe love, maybe fame.”

Beth: “It’s a funny thing, being married to someone for so long, being someone’s best friend for so long. Because on those few occasions when they surprise you, it feels like the biggest thing in the world, like a crack in the sky, like the moon, suddenly rising over the horizon twenty times bigger than the last time you looked.”

Lee “I live here, I have chosen to live here [in Little Wing], because life seems real to me here. Authentic, genuine—I don’t know, viable.”

This story explores the way our youthful friendships change as we grow older. When we're teenagers, it's all about having fun together. Everything is in the future. We can talk about our dreams and what we hope to do with our lives and anything is possible. After we graduate from high school and go out into the world, life gets complicated, and our old friendships are profoundly altered. Some people have great success, others have great misfortune. Some stay in town and take the "boring" route through life, others head for the big city seeking fame and excitement. But when they come back to their hometown, they're really still that same kid we once knew. They're just a bit more beaten and battered.

The story is told in the alternating voices of several characters. My enjoyment varied greatly depending on who was telling the story. It starts out with Henry, and I loved his voice. It was poignant without being sappy. When Leland comes back to Little Wing to lick his wounds, his voice is similarly compelling when he recognizes all the beautiful things he missed about his hometown. I didn't care for Beth's voice, and unfortunately she's given quite a lot of space in the book. Her narrative style was too banal, making it almost feel like chick lit.
Ronny and Kip's voices were fine, but not memorable.


My appreciation of the book was uneven. There are some lovely, profound passages, and also some places that seem to drag.