A review by mhlanghoff
Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

3.0

Butler is a talented prose stylist, and he writes with a moving sincerity. That said, the novel's treatment of small-town life is simplistic and sentimentalized. The characters all seem to have a binary view of their small town as a wholesome place where everyone is poor but honest and hard-working and loyal, while city dwellers and outsiders are all rich, shallow, and (in one memorable case) prone to random violence. This could be written off as the biases of the first-person narrators, but the book itself never really challenges it.

(Disclaimer: I've spent most of my life in small towns.)