This quirky epistolary novel follows a family of culture-shocked Brooklynites transplanted to Goodnight, Kansas and their fight to save their unexpected lifeline: the legendary May Day Diner.
Chef Sid Solvang has lost everything in New York. He swears he’ll never set foot in a kitchen again, when he flees with his family to the crumbling Victorian his wife has inherited in Goodnight, Kansas. While Sid searches for a way home, his daughter searches for answers from the cryptic messages her grandfather left behind. When Sid rescues the town’s iconic May Day Diner from the wrecking ball, the Solvangs become entangled in the politics of Emporia Road, where half the town believes the only thing keeping them on the map is the same thing that might be killing them. With the help of a wayward girl named Disco, a house full of alpacas, and a community that plays by its own rules, they discover a secret that could make or break the town. As a picket line is drawn through Goodnight, the May Day Diner has a new mission.
Told in diary entries, emails, letters, and a town paper of the Lady Whistledown variety, A TOWN WITH HALF THE LIGHTS ON is a tender and funny story that proves that family isn’t just your relatives, home isn’t just the place you live, and true community can change anything.
They say there are more than 6,000 ghost towns in Kansas. This is the story of one town’s fight to stay on the map.
Page Getz is an author and journalist who spent half her life in Kansas and the other half in California, working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and Pacifica Radio. Her work appears in many publications, reconciling themes of diaspora, mysticism, addiction, classism, labor justice, queerness, and small towns.
She lives with her family and a constant procession of dogs in Vancouver, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. Once called, “Anne of Green Gables on Acid,” she is not on acid, but she does love a good gable. She’s still recovering from the wayward youth and pathological idealism that inspires her work.
Her debut novel, “A Town with Half the Lights On,” is slated for release by Sourcebooks, Spring 2025.
WE INVENTED CRAZY
When a closeted high school teacher is outed and fired, three idealistic riot grrrls sharing a holding cell are inspired to publish "The Rag," a feminist zine to take down patriarchy, but it’s 1990-something in Kansas and everyone they know is vaguely suicidal, vaguely gay and un-vaguely strung out on speed.
WE INVENTED CRAZY is an absurdist biography of the 1990s at a moment when half the zeitgeist is rehab-bound and the other half is doing the Macarena.
