In this fraught, bewildering American era, Heather Lende’s latest memoir is a blessed balm.

Heather Lende offers a down-to-earth account of life in local politics in her fourth book set in Haines, her small Alaska town.

Lende’s writing has a homespun, plainspoken quality; at certain moments, she writes like a grandmother telling a meandering tale through a series of slow-paced anecdotes and tangents that require patience from the reader.

Journalist Lende...delivers a detailed and amiable chronicle of her three-year term as assemblywoman in Haines Borough, Alaska, a municipality of roughly 2,500 people in the state’s southern panhandle.

Welcome back to Haines, Alaska, population 1,600. The cast of characters and places Lende wrote about in her three previous books return in this homespun foray into local politics.