Clocking in at roughly 150 pages and coming out November 10th, Embracing the Local is an upcoming civic memoir that chronicles Glen Cantrell in his first year as president of the Twain Harte Area Chamber of Commerce. Pitched somewhere between a memoir and an essay collection, it arrives with a somewhat unusual origin story. The author was a consultant who spent two decades working with businesses, and various government agencies, before he stumbled into small-town civic leadership almost accidentally, over what he describes as one too many glasses of wine at a local wine bar. The book is his attempt to make sense of what followed.
The book tracks roughly a year in Cantrell’s tenure, opening with his reluctant ascension to the Chamber presidency and closing with his attempts to hand pieces of that role back off to others. In between, the book moves through a series of loosely connected episodes rather than a tight plot, such as a struggling local business publicly admitting it might not survive the season, a Christmas display that goes wrong and a scavenger hunt involving an elf costume. It also includes a slow reckoning with how much of the author’s own identity and marriage he was sacrificing to a volunteer job that, on paper, nobody was making him do.
What the book does best is feel like a friendly voice who’s cornered you at a party with a story you didn’t particularly want to hear, only to have you leaning in twenty minutes later, glad they kept talking. It’s also an educational read for anyone interested in civic government. It’s genuinely a useful primer on how small-town civic life actually functions, including the unglamorous, all-volunteer machinery that fills in where local government doesn’t reach.
The second real strength is the number of small, hard-won lessons the book offers about leadership, volunteering, and life more generally without feeling like a chore to read. The author doesn’t lecture; the lessons arrive through anecdote. Early on, a struggling business’s public admission that it might not survive the season teaches him that goodwill alone can’t fix a bad quarter. Later, watching his vice president step into the Bigfoot costume he used to wear himself teaches him that letting go is its own form of leadership.
The author’s writing style is conversational and self-deprecating almost to a fault, favoring short, punchy sentences and a wry narrator’s voice that reads like catching up with a smart friend recounting a rough year over drinks. He leans on direct address to the reader, mid-paragraph asides, and running bits that pay off later in the book. It’s an approachable, unpretentious style that keeps what could be a dry subject feeling personal and readable rather than procedural, with memorable lines showing up when you least expect them, “Love is not a strategy.”
Pacing-wise, the book benefits from its brevity. At around 150 pages, it never overstays its welcome, feeling much like one extended, long-form article. The episodic chapter structure (each built around one incident or theme, like “Unpayable Costs” or “The Remodel Trap”) makes it easy to read in brief sittings. The chapters build cumulatively toward Cantrell having a slow, hard-won realization.
Another strong aspect of the book is the humor underneath the heavier material. Cantrell never lets a serious point sit too long without undercutting it; a chapter about institutional burnout will pause for a joke about a regrettable Canva design decision made at 11 p.m., or a solemn moment about succession will get interrupted by a grown man inside a Bigfoot suit, the praise quotes at the start that are from the author’s pets. That balance keeps the book lively.
That said, it’s doubtless that some may feel the book can drag in places, since it doesn’t rely on traditional narrative tension or a hook to pull the reader forward. A reader who isn’t personally invested in small-town civic life may find some middle chapters more observational than gripping, even though Cantrell’s humor keeps things from feeling like a slog.
The book’s structure reflects its origins as something closer to a working journal than a planned manuscript. The material seemingly grew out of notes and reflections he kept during his Chamber tenure, later reshaped into chapters organized by theme rather than strict chronology. That process shows in the text: some chapters function almost like standalone essays, capable of being read out of sequence, while others depend more on events established earlier in the book.
“Being changed by a place is less charming than it sounds. It means realizing your instincts aren’t neutral. The qualities that make you useful can also make you dangerous. Speed can hide fragility. Clarity can flatten other people’s experiences. A group can seem like it’s agreeing with you when it’s actually too tired to keep arguing with you. Rude, but true enough.”
The final highlight of the book is the relationship between the author and his partner, Michael, who doesn’t get many scenes but makes the ones he gets land. His role in the book is mostly to show the cost of the author’s new role on his personal life. By the last chapters, when date nights come back, that’s how the reader knows something actually changed.
All in all, Embracing the Local succeeds as an honest little book about a subject that rarely gets literary treatment: the invisible, unpaid labor that keeps rural communities functioning. It isn’t a business book, self-help book or a tidy inspirational memoir with a clean redemption arc. It’s messier than that, and more interesting for it. Scheduled for publication this November, it’s the perfect book for anyone who’s ever inherited a job nobody else wanted, or spent a little too long wondering why they were the only one still working at the end of the day.
Final verdict: For fans of Bill Bryson, David Sedaris-style personal essay collections, or books like The Art of Community, Embracing the Local is a quick, funny, occasionally profound, and ultimately affecting read. Thank you to the author for the ARC copy!
