Box of Tricks

The town of Urbana, Ohio was not a utopia when Beth Macy grew up there in the 70’s and 80’s, certainly not for her family. Her dad was an alcoholic who only fitfully worked, and people called him the town drunk, which hurt, as did their poverty. But Urbana had a healthy enough economy, and there were middle class kids at school whose families became her role models. People in Urbana were proud of their schools, and the library, and the history of their town, an important stop on the Underground Railroad. Macy loved Urbana, and though she was able to make it to college on a Pell Grant and then follow a career in journalism that took her far away, she still clung gratefully to the hometown that helped raise her. On the surface it was still picture-postcard cute.

But as Macy’s mother’s health began its final descent in 2020, on more frequent visits home to Ohio, she couldn’t shake the feeling that her town had dramatically hardened in ways she couldn’t process. Beth grew up as the paper girl, delivering the local newspaper, which was like civic glue, mirroring the community back to itself. Now there was no local paper, no paper girl, and precious little civic glue. Yes, a lot of the work that once supported the middle class had gone away, along with all that went with it. But that was an old story that didn’t begin to cover the forces turning her town into a poorer and angrier place. High school graduation rates were plummeting as absenteeism soared in the public schools and in the workplace. A mental health crisis gripped the small city, along with a litany of other pathologies. Urbana’s pride in its institutions was parents were opting to home school, or transferring their kids elsewhere, in record numbers. Even more painfully, many of her own family members and old friends had gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracies like QAnon, and worse. What happened to Urbana?

This was not an assignment Beth Macy ever wanted to take, but she felt she had no choice. Two years ago, she began to return regularly, to deploy everything she’d learned to figure her hometown out. The result is an astonishment, a book that takes us into the heart of one specific place and through it brings into focus in a new way our most urgent set of national issues.

I was hoping that there was more to this book than the pity-party that’s J.D. Vance’s book. I was not disappointed. Rather than focusing only the people who didn’t make it out, Macy also covers those who did, who managed to fight their way to a better life.

Coming from a western city that has only continued to grow, I’ve often been perplexed by how so many cities and towns in the rest of the country have drowned in poverty and drug abuse. Macy answers many of my questions, showing the best of even those who have a totally different mindset. Still, it was sometimes difficult to read. Many of the people in the town hate immigrants, gays, liberals,. Their anger at these groups, and the thought that something was taken from them and given to these groups, fuels their anger.

I’m not sure if Urbana was survive. It has some great people fighting for it, but it seems to be an uphill battle.




( Mount TBR 2026 Book Links 1-20 )

21. Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
22. Black Wind by F. Paul Wilson
23. Tiger Burning Bright by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey
24. Implant by F. Paul Wilson
25. The Last Champion of York: Francis Lovell, Richard III's Truest Friend by Stephen David
26. Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America by Beth Macy

Between 1483 and 1485 Viscount Francis Lovell was one of the most important and influential men in the government of his childhood friend Richard III, becoming the King's Chamberlain and a Knight of the Garter. Lovell continued to support a Ricardian claim to the throne long after Richard III's death at Bosworth, and his elusive presence cast a dark shadow over the early years of Henry VII's reign. He became Henry VII's most persistent and dangerous enemy, orchestrating an assassination attempt on the new king. He was also architect of an international conspiracy that sought to replace Henry with a Ricardian pretender known as ‘Lambert Simnel', which culminated in the battle of Stoke in 1487, the last true battle in the Wars of the Roses. Following Stoke, Lovell disappears from historical record and his fate is a mystery to this day. The eighteenth-century discovery at Minster Lovell of the skeletal remains of a medieval man in a sealed vault possibly reveals the final resting place of Francis Lovell – the last champion of York.

I should have guessed, when the book started with the old tale of workmen digging up a vault in 1708 with a person’s remains inside, that, more often than not, a lot of information would be slanted, to say the least. Anyway, rather conveniently, the skeleton, sitting at a desk, promptly disintegrated. The house having been that of Francis Lovell, it was deduced that it would be his remains.

Lots of things wrong with this. First off, bones don’t instantly disintegrate when exposed to air; the process would take years.

Secondly, why would a person hide in a vault that only opened from the outside? That wouldn’t be a place to hide, it would be a jail cell. The author then posits that Lovell may have died from wounds from the battle of Stoke Field and left in the vault by his supporters. That being the case, why would he have been left in a sitting position, rather than on a bed? Basically, a myth along the lines of the one where Richard III’s bones were dug up and thrown into the River Soar during the dissolutions of the monasteries.

There’s not a lot known about Francis Lovell; I was hoping to learn more about him from this book. But after the tall tale about his remains, the book doesn’t really focus on him. Rather, it covers the war amongst the Plantagenets with a bit of how Lovell may have fit into the story from time to time.

Eventually, we get to bad, evil Richard. The writer tries to whitewash Lovell, while at the same time allowing that he was Richard’s best friend. Did Lovell know about all the evil deeds done by big, bad Richard? The writer seems to think so. But it’s hard to imagine such an upright man giving his loyalty to Richard, up to and after Richard’s death. A very disappointing read.




( Mount TBR 2026 Book Links 1-15 )

16. The Girl in the Green Glass Mirror by Elizabeth McGregor
17. Helen's Judgement (House of Atreus 2) by Susan C. Wilson
18. The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding by Joseph J. Ellis
19. The Hungry Moon by Ramsey Campbell
20. Neverwhere (London Below #1) by Neil Gaiman
21. Signal to Noise by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
22. Black Wind by F. Paul Wilson
23. Tiger Burning Bright by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Andre Norton, Mercedes Lackey
24. Implant by F. Paul Wilson
25. The Last Champion of York: Francis Lovell, Richard III's Truest Friend by Stephen David