Welcome to Utopia

March 8, 2010
Valby, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly
, profiles Utopia, Tex., in a lackluster account of life in contemporary smalltown America. The author discovered Utopia in 2006 and, hoping “to get past the mythology of the small town and understand it as a real place where actual people live,” repeatedly returned to the unincorporated ranching community in the scenic Texas Hill Country for the next two years. The Census counts 241 Utopians, and while many of them appear in Valby's narrative, she focuses on four to tell her story: Ralph Boyce, “the quintessential old-timer” and the dean of the early-morning coffee drinkers at the General Store; Kathy Wiekamp, a popular waitress and mother of four boys; Colter Padgett, “the town misfit”; and Kelli Rhodes, the only black student at Utopia School. While the four are a diverse lot, in Valby's hands, they only sporadically rise above the level of stereotype and fall short of demythologizing small towns. The author also provides too little context for her observations, and her conclusions—e.g., Utopians are provincial; racism still exists in rural Texas; and small towns see rapid change as a threat—are neither surprising nor original.

March 15, 2010
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 clichs ("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 Caf, 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.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

July 1, 2010
During extended visits over a two-year period beginning in 2006, Valby (senior writer, "Entertainment Weekly" lived among the residents of the small town of Utopia, TX. She witnessed the effects of rapid changes brought about by the recent invasion of satellite TV, broadband, and Wi-Fi—forces defined by old-timers as destructive to their proud small-town culture. Young people, however, regarded the changes as liberating. Some were anxious to leave the restrictive sameness of Utopia but felt tethered by that same familiarity as well as the comfort of their traditional roots. Valby looks beyond mythology and stereotypes to depict the real-life dynamics of a small American town's everyday joys, life-changing tragedies and choices, and customary celebrations, using its inhabitants' own frank, sensitive, intolerant, and kindhearted words and actions, rarely criticizing or commenting beyond the obvious. VERDICTValby's well-crafted book is an example of nonfiction literature that vividly and poignantly portrays the interconnectivity and compassion of small-town life, factors that according to Valby are essential to our humanness. Recommended for teen and adult popular nonfiction and fiction readers, and students of social dynamics.—Margaret Kappanadze, Elmira Coll. Lib., NY

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2010
Journalist Valby was given a challenging assignment: find a town in the U.S. so small or so remote that it was somehow off the radar of pop culture. Remarkably, she found one: Utopia, Texas, with a population of about 1,000. The town has no mayor, no stoplights, no fast-food restaurants, no chain stores, and no movie theater. (There are seven churches, though.) But even Utopia could not remain untouched for long: as Valby was writing her article, satellite TV and broadband were making their way to Utopia, opening the town up to the larger world outside its narrow borders. Valby finished her magazine article, but then, wanting to get past the mythology of the small town, she went back to Utopia, spending two years there getting to know its people, its rhythms, its past, and its future. The book is a portrait of a small town in transition, a town that is growing globally and perhaps even philosophically, if not physically. A revealing account, bittersweet in the way Margaret Meads work was.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)