Thursday's Child and Other Stories consists of seven stories about people who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s in a small town in northeast Alabama. Reading the narratives involves a bit of time-traveling, but it's not nostalgic. It's more about a world carefully observed. The people are real, both in relation to their strong points and their intriguing flaws. The detailing is engaging. You want to stay in the town of Port Reed for a while, poking around and absorbing everything you can before you have to return home. The stories, although they are totally fictional, are aided by the fact that the author spent her childhood in small-town Alabama before moving to California, where she had a successful career in television.