"The author painstakingly recreates the physical layout of the stores, train station, school, church, and virtually every other public building in a town of 200 souls. He instructs the reader on how everything mechanical inside them worked, with careful attention to the provisions for heat, water, and sewage. Electricity and automobiles receive special consideration since the author’s father ran an automotive and farm machinery business, and also operated the town’s often inadequate power plant. Plentiful too, are the obligatory references to gopher hunting, rafting on sloughs, curling, baseball, hockey, threshing, mail-order catalogues, storms, dances, radio, and the movies. While less prominent, character sketches of the town’s eccentrics dutifully appear."