Start with an attention grabbing question: What does a person have to do to find out certain ' family secrets? Would life then make a little more sense? Maybe there are no big, bad secrets. How do you know unless you look? Follow with a little more detail to say how the book answers the question: John Randt grew up in suburban Ohio, the only child of loving and capable parents. They gave him a childhood that was 'orderly. Only when he went away to college did he discover that not every family in America would write the date of purchase on fresh raw eggs so each could be used in the order it was bought. In the Randt household nothing was ever spoiled, lost, or out of place. It was perhaps inevitable that he would become interested in people with 'messy lives. At length this would take him on a trip of discovery that included a southern community in the process of losing its own particular character and the last remnants of its innocence. He found himself involved with a one hundred year old family mystery, met a race car driving female cousin and a cast of other unforgettable characters. He ultimately found more than he sought.

The Sunshine Mountain Valley is a lovely little crossroads community in north-central-south-western North Carolina, located near the intersection of two interstate highways, two great concrete and steel ribbons of travel and commerce, that cross and go their separate ways just out of sight, and out of mind, of the people of the valley.

These are their stories, some told from the porch of the Bull Tail Tavern, so named because the owner was enamored of Mark Twain who noted that the man who takes a bull by the tail is privileged to information not available to others. People of the valley live lives and have experiences not available to others.

Read this book for the simple enjoyment of the stories or as an aspiring storyteller. Each of the main stories is followed by a section discussing a potentially difficult element in the telling of that story. There are unfinished stories for the writer or storyteller to complete, and shorts about children, to remind all readers that we are all storytellers.