Leaving Juneau County is a fictional coming-of-age story set in the small western Wisconsin town of Mauston during the 1958-59 school year. Author Dan Linssen chose the era and location to fit a specific set of events incorporated into the story.
Linssen's familiarity with rural Wisconsin, combined with the extensive research conducted for this novel, produce an authenticity of detail that ranks with the best of today's writers. Readers are treated to a realistic immersion into the world of late 1950s Juneau County. Numerous historical events of local, regional, and national scale are threaded into the fictional fabric of the story.
Leaving Juneau County chronicles Jack Barton and his three inseparable, longtime friends as they navigate their final year at Mauston High School. Their confrontation with the impending transition to adulthood is complicated by romantic connections, natural calamities, unsavory characters, and even governmental intrusion. The story is supplemented with a rich cast of supporting characters. Despite the diversity, Linssen does a good job of bringing them all to life.
Told almost entirely from the viewpoint of the protagonist, Leaving Juneau County might have included simultaneous perspectives of the other main characters. However, already over 400 pages, that would have pushed the novel's length to extreme limits.
In the end, Linssen leaves you wishing you had grown up with such a tight knit and supportive gang of friends, and wishing you could follow them forward into their respective futures.