This Ain't Provence — Eric Johnson

A warmhearted and witty account of an exhausted suburbanite's exhausting year above the Cheddar Curtain, This Ain't Provence transports readers to the Good Enough region of Southwest Wisconsin, a beautiful but overlooked corner of the world populated by contoured farms, towering river bluffs, tiresome vacationers and colorful locals as generous as the are frustrating. When a wealthy uncle leaves writer Eric Johnson with an unexpected windfall, the life long suburbanite trades Chicago for the tiny Mississippi River town of Burly Flow and impulsively rents the Old Sanderly Place, a magnificent wreck of a farmhouse on land farmed by Ewan Schneider, a soft spoken man who, along with his wife, Fanny, manages to fill his early mornings with noisy complications and his days with exasperating, but ultimately rewarding adventures. From the opening, highly unorthodox pig drive to the last ride down an impossibly remote back road, Eric Johnson charms readers with his appreciation of the ordinary and his ability to meet the amusing challenges of his new life with an open mind. By the end of the book, his colorful portraits of small town traditions and his descriptions of the eccentric townsfolk will have people wanting to head up to Burly Flow to rent a place of their own.