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Every Saturday, Catherine Grace Cline sits on a picnic table at the Dairy Queen, licks a Dilly Bar and thinks about the world. Her hometown, Ringgold, Ga., has one stoplight, one diner and one trailer that passes for a post office. Catherine Grace, the protagonist of Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen (Random House, 293 pp., $23), by Nashville author Susan Gregg Gilmore, is the sharp-tongued, sassy daughter of Ringgold’s beloved Baptist preacher, and her lifelong dream is to become a sales clerk in a big Atlanta department store. So she sits on that picnic table just waiting for the day when she turns 18 and can buy a ticket on the first Greyhound heading out of town.

In Catherine Grace and the colorful residents of Ringgold, Gilmore has created a complete, fully realized community. Like Garrison Keillor’s comforting Lake Wobegon or the gleefully upbeat town of Stars Hollow on Gilmore Girls, Ringgold is small enough to make the reader familiar with every side street and back alley.

There’s the dark, unhappy home that belongs to Catherine Grace’s best friend, the church she attends every Sunday whether she wants to or not, the high school football field, the Dollar General store, and the sticky picnic table outside the Dairy Queen. Gilmore describes the town with such ease and fluidity it’s almost another character in the story. When two unexpected events befall the Cline family, Catherine Grace wanders through town, confused and searching for solace in landmarks that, by then, the reader finds reassuring, too.

Dairy Queen is an earnest novel that manages to depict Southern life without turning to stereotypes or caricatures. Despite a few imperfections—Gilmore never explains what a Dilly Bar is, and those unfamiliar with the chocolate-covered ice cream treat that’s shaped like a lollypop are left picturing something much less charming, like an ice cream sandwich—the story is smooth and rich, with phrases like “dad-gum” that just beg to be read with a twang.

Nashville may be a bit bigger than Ringgold, but Gilmore has extensive experience in the ways of Southern life. She has chaired book fairs, filled her kitchen with bake sale cupcakes and taught Vacation Bible School, all while writing a weekly parenting column for the Chattanooga Times Free Press. She also knows a little bit about that Greyhound dream: Gilmore was working as a writer in Los Angeles when, inspired by memories of weekly trips to Dairy Queen with her grandfather, she wrote the novel. But now she’s back in Nashville with its Sunday church crowd, its Southern hospitality and ice-cold Dilly Bars.

“You know, Martha Ann,” Catherine Grace tells her younger sister, “I’m not so sure a person can run away from home.” But according to Susan Gregg Gilmore, sometimes you still have to try. —Claire Suddath