Apr 18

Apr 18 Review: A Town with Half the Lights On by Page Getz

What with the unrelenting and wallet-meltingly expensive nonsense that is life in 2025, we’re going to need more books that make us feel good for at least a short time. (That is, unless you’re pals with a billionaire and can take an 11-minute space trip for the feminism and aesthetic of it all. I’m going to take a punt and reckon that that’s not more than, say, 5% of my readership, and in that case:) I’ve got the very book recommendation you were needing.

Sometimes you know within minutes of starting a book that it’s going to be a good yin. Actually, I reckoned I was going to like this from just the title, cover and blurb, but by the end of the first few paragraphs I was. All. In.

The Solvang family - Sid, Scarlet and teenaged Harlem - are rolling into the town of Goodnight, Kansas. It’s Scarlet’s home town, but she’s not been back here for 20 years (why? Hang on a bit). The family have lost everything following the collapse of the New York deli business that had been in Sid’s family for generations. Forced to sell up and move with what little they have left, they are retreating to Scarlet’s family home in the wake of her father’s death to lick their wounds.

They quickly realise that Goodnight is a town in the midst of crises big and small, and their early skirmishes with locals (and the refusal of Scarlet’s family to talk to them at all) only reaffirms their determination to get back to Brooklyn as soon as they possibly can. That will need money though, and cash is in short supply. Along with her new friend Disco, Harlem embarks on a quest to find out whether her grandad really did leave behind a hidden fortune - or is the secret something more sinister?

Meanwhile, there’s been another round of layoffs at the Goodnight American Tyre Company, the only show in town when it comes to employment opportunities. No one is about to challenge their horrible workplace conditions or try to unionise again, not when it’s already hard enough to get food on the table.

The whole book is told in emails, notes, letters in the local newspaper, and even some police reports. The style took a little getting used to, but I quickly found the rhythm and ultimately I loved it. The interplays between characters were brilliant, and the pace kept up the whole way through. Each character had such a distinct vocabulary and tone, and the audiobook narrator captured this well.

Not every author can convey such a range of characters in sufficiently short order, but Getz uses some really clever tools to get readers up to speed, without bludgeoning us around the head with backstory. Even each person’s email address provides a snapshot of their essential id (torturedsol, lostblue, revelationsevenfold, omwardbound, brooklyncalling…)

And oh, such characters! Disco, the yodelling, glitter-loving country music fan shunned by her classmates. Sid and Scarlet, reeling from their change in fortune and who’ve forgotten entirely how to be together. (She hides in the kitchen, he builds endless boxes for birds that never seem to come). Harlem, trying to find her place in this new and unfamiliar environment and desperately missing her life in New York.

Then the rest of the town! The dastardly mayor, the proud patriots, the down-on-their-luck-just-trying-to-get-bys. The excellent mailman and the actually-decent-pastor and the farmers and the police department. This is small town America at its best and worst (the town council are standing by to update the population sign if the family were to stay). In fact, the scenes here will be recognisable to anyone who’s lived in a town small enough to know each others’ business, American or not.

As Sid starts to claw his way out of his fug of failure, opportunities begin to appear and perhaps the Solvang fortunes are about to change. Could the May Day Diner be saved? But opportunities also mean challenges - and not everyone in the town is happy about what they’re trying to do.

The sub-plots and recurring themes in the local paper’s classifieds (wandering goats! experimental menus! missing false teeth! stolen windchimes!) were some of the threads that helped tie together the disparate plotlines.

You could take any number of messages away from A Town with Half the Lights On. The importance of community? The free press? Finding your own path, or standing up to The Man? I’m here for all of it. But the book is also damn funny, and I am ALL about that; it had me laughing into my folded laundry many times.

A Town with Half the Lights On seems to be Getz’s first novel, but it feels much more expansive and assured than many debuts. Purpose, message, mystery and humour? Keep an eye on this author - I predict more great things to come.