I approached this with a kind of wariness that came with the fact that I'll never have the same emotional reaction to this book as people for whom it is formative. Regardless, it was honestly compelling and quite moving. While it is simplistic in its depiction of some societal inequities, I got no sense that it was trying to flatter the status quo out of some misguided sense of nostalgia. The setting held a lot of warmth and love but there was also a lot of ugliness, and that came through in the story as well.