Exceedingly worthy of anyone’s time, Theresa Anne Fowler’s novel, A Good Neighborhood (320 pp. St. Martin’s Press, $27.99), profiles two families in conflict – first, over a dying tree separating their yards; later, to thwart a budding teenage love affair. Authored from the perspective of their neighbors in a non-descript town in North Carolina, Fowler painstakingly attempts to detail rising tensions between families of differing races while skirting criticisms of cultural appropriation that surrounded Jeanine Cummins’ recent release, American Dirt. She succeeds in providing a tragically beautiful tale of wasted youth under the shade of an oak tree, and the glares of those hidden behind window blinds.