Shotgun Lovesongs: A Novel

A perfectly evocative tribute to small-town America and longtime friendships...

Some books do a great job evoking a sense of place and a general mood, which draw you even further into them. Nickolas Butler's Shotgun Lovesongs is one such book. It's beautifully written—poetic, even—and tremendously compelling, and I read it between two short flights. Little Wing, Wisconsin is a small rural town. Henry, Lee, Ronny, and Kip were best friends who grew up together. While Henry stayed in Little Wing to take over his father's dairy farm, Ronny found some success on the rodeo circuit before his drinking led to a brain injury following an arrest, Kip moved to Chicago to become a broker for the Mercantile Exchange, and Lee was the successful one, becoming a popular singer. Ten years later, the friends are reunited for Kip's wedding, as he has returned to Little Wing to breathe life into the town's defunct mill. Lee agrees to sing a song at the wedding, and he finds himself caught between the magic of a new relationship with a successful actress and the desire to return home, where life is simpler. But the wedding also causes the start of some stresses among the friends, as they deal with the problems of their own lives and the envy, frustration, jealousy, and insecurity of small-town life when you've known each other forever. The book shifts in perspective between the four friends as well as Henry's wife, Beth, who also grew up in Little Wing, and had a special connection with many of the friends. It moves back and forth through time, touching on the victories and defeats, hurts and happy times. While some characters are more engaging than others, Butler has imbued them with such life and complexity that they feel almost larger than life, and you find yourself wishing you had friends like these. While nothing out of the ordinary happens in the plot, it doesn't matter, because you become truly invested in their lives. Shotgun Lovesongs is a paean to life in small-town America, its virtues and its disadvantages. It's a book about trying to live your dre...