Anyone who remembers family radio and the front-porch swing, bootleg booze and the golden evenings of small-town summers, will make this book his own. It provides irrefutable evidence that the best place for a twelve-year-old boy to grow up during the 1930s was in a small midwestern town.

Of course, the boys -- "Old Trader" and his brother, Rupert -- do become involved with the mobs. Father does lose his job. Beautiful Cousin Charlene elopes with one of two men -- but which one? And -- most regrettably -- Father sets out to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that there's no such thing as luck.

Here they are: the boys; their moonstruck sister; their perturbable parents; Myra, the gangster-loving housekeeper; and Pete the handyman, a free spirit if there ever was one.

The Golden Evenings of Summer lets us live for a while in a sunlit world that we might have chosen for our own childhood. If you ache with laughter as you read, and hear in the distance echoes of Harry Horlick and the A & P Gypsies, so much the better.