Fort Appleby, Texas, 1952—the small West Texas mountain town to which the people of Houston, El Paso and San Antonio flee to escape the dreaded polio epidemic. And then polio hits Fort Appleby, a frightening four cases in a town of 800. School is closed, and the people spend their time fighting fear and attending funerals.

For senior football star Kevin Adams, 1952 is the year when his life is turned upside down by the epidemic and by the uncertainties that come of being seventeen and eager for all of life, from girls to football to great literature. Kevin struggles to sort out the many relationships in his life—there’s Jasper, his best buddy and the first polio victim; Rosa, the Mexican girl society forbids him to love, and her mother, Carmelita, who drives a strange bargain with Kevin; Jay Eisenbarger, the high school principal who sees in Kevin that rare pupil in whom education lights a spark; and Mary Beth Adams, his remote and distant mother.

With careful attention to detail, Bryan Woolley draws you into several small worlds—that of a West Texas town, that of adolescence, and that of the pain and grief of loss. Time and Place is a sweet, sad, sometimes funny novel that deals with universal problems yet roots them deeply in West Texas, a regional novel in the best sense of the word.