As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky's Once upon a Small-Town Time have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in an uplifting nostalgia, but without the cloying sentimentality. The observations are fond, even wistful, but never anything but fair and clear and unexaggerated in their effect.

Poetry. "As the title of this collection suggests, the poems in Louis Daniel Brodsky's ONCE UPON A SMALL-TOWN TIME have a soothing sort of lullaby quality characteristic of bedtime tales. Conceived as a metaphoric road trip through three Midwestern towns and across a quarter century, the poems are steeped in an uplifting nostalgia, but without the cloying sentimentality. The observations are fond, even wistful, but never anything but fair and clear and unexaggerated in their effect"--Charles Rammelkamp.

Fresh out of high school, Babe Vogel should be thrilled to have the whole summer at her fingertips. She loves living in her lighthouse home in the sleepy Maine beach town of Oar’s Rest and being a barista at the Busy Bean, but she’s totally freaking out about how her life will change when her two best friends go to college in the fall. And when a reckless kiss causes all three of them to break up, she may lose them a lot sooner. On top of that, her ex-girlfriend is back in town, bringing with her a slew of memories, both good and bad. And then there’s Levi Keller, the cute artist who’s spending all his free time at the coffee shop where she works. Levi’s from out of town, and even though Babe knows better than to fall for a tourist who will leave when summer ends, she can’t stop herself from wanting to know him. Can Babe keep her distance, or will she break the one rule she’s always had - to never fall for a summer boy?

One last thing, if you do fall in love with him, please go slowly. Be careful. Trust your gut and know not all things are easy. Damaged things can become beautiful if they're placed in the right hands. -Love, GranA small town where pickup trucks rule, the farmer's market is bigger than the grocery store, and just about everyone goes to church on Sunday is the last place Henley Warren expects to find herself three months after her grandmother's death. But Gran left a list of things she needed Henley to do after she died, and fulfilling those wishes means spending a summer in the same place her mom fled from when she was only seventeen years old. With each task that is ticked off the list, events are set in motion that uncover secrets surrounding Henley's life. Although Henley may have arrived on the shores of Alabama's Gulf Coast feeling alone and lost in a world without her Gran, things soon change. The small town holds more than she realized- including a broody, gorgeous, potentially dangerous guy who is always showing up when she needs him the most. Henley fears her heart isn't ready to trust someone so unpredictable but he makes her feel things deeper than she thought possible. So, when Henley discovers the twisted, dark world he is living in, will it be too late to save her heart? Or has her heart been beyond saving from the moment he stepped out of his truck on that very first day?

For Sophie, small town life has never felt small. With her four best friends—loving, infuriating, and all she could ever ask for—she can weather any storm. But when Sophie’s beloved Acadia High School marching band is selected to march in the upcoming Rose Parade, it’s her job to get them all the way to LA. Her plan? To persuade country singer Megan Pleasant, their Midwestern town’s only claim to fame, to come back to Acadia to headline a fundraising festival. The only problem is that Megan has very publicly sworn never to return. What ensues is a journey filled with long-kept secrets, hidden heartbreaks, and revelations that could change everything—along with a possible fifth best friend: a new guy with a magnetic smile and secrets of his own.

After a young stranger walks up to Elizabeth Kenney on campus, and announces that he's her brother, she drops out of school to begin a startling and surprising search of a family she's never taken the time to know. She learns of a wanderlust grandfather, bomber pilot and hero of WWII and Korea, then of her own surgeon father and his idyllic and unbreakable bond with his father. This nostalgic and sometimes spiritual story takes the reader through America's Depression, the wars, and postwar California and Mid-America, where safe tranquility unsuspectingly teeters on the threshold of today's helter-skelter world. Elizabeth becomes torn between the wishes of her affluent, matriarchal grandmother and her own creative needs. So, caught up in the editing of her father's stored journals, Elizabeth creates a modern fairytale that tenderly invites every reader with love, laughter and tears.

In search of "the best America there ever was," bestselling author and award-winning journalist Bob Greene finds it in a small Nebraska town few people pass through today—a town where Greene discovers the echoes of the most touching love story imaginable: a love story between a country and its sons. During World War II, American soldiers from every city and walk of life rolled through North Platte, Nebraska, on troop trains en route to their ultimate destinations in Europe and the Pacific. The tiny town, wanting to offer the servicemen warmth and support, transformed its modest railroad depot into the North Platte Canteen. Every day of the year, every day of the war, the Canteen—staffed and funded entirely by local volunteers—was open from five a.m. until the last troop train of the day pulled away after midnight. Astonishingly, this remote plains community of only 12,000 people provided welcoming words, friendship, and baskets of food and treats to more than six million GIs by the time the war ended. In this poignant and heartwarming eyewitness history, based on interviews with North Platte residents and the soldiers who once passed through, Bob Greene tells a classic, lost-in-the-mists-of-time American story of a grateful country honoring its brave and dedicated sons.