Remembering the Good Times is set in a small rural town in middle America where suburbia with its housing developments and shopping malls is slowly swallowing up the meadows and farm land. Two of the main characters in the book, Kate and Trav, represent the two extremes in the area while Buck is not too sure exactly where he fits. Kate lives with her mother and great grandmother Polly Prior in the house beside the pear orchard that her family has owned for generations. Trav's family, however, is part of the group of successful, upwardly mobile suburbanites whose subdivisions are changing the rural countryside. In the beginning of the novel, Buck is living with his mother and spending his summers with his father who works at the Slocum construction sites. When Buck's mother decides to remarry and move to Cleveland, Buck comes to live with his father in...