In many ways "Village Year" is the most satisfactory part of the [Sac Prairie] series yet to appear, for it has the virtues of the others without their weaknesses, and adds a definite quality of its own. It is not intended to be a record of the bridge parties and local visits which are duly reported in the local press but, rather, it is meant to preserve the little things, the daily between-the-lines life of a village….

[Derleth] deepens the value of his village setting by presenting in full the enduring natural background; with the people projected against this the writing comes to have the quality of an old Flemish picture, humanity lively and amusing and lovable in the foreground and nature magnificent beyond. This book is filled with accounts of the author's travels through the Sac Prairie region and his nightly walks to the marshes by the river, where he notes the different bird calls and compares them with the findings of other naturalists. The progress of flowers in the spring is carefully watched, and when the geese go honking south in October, their departure is reported.

All the human figures in these journals are not seen in the humorous light that bathes most of them—there are relatives and friends, young and old, who died as the years pass, and the significance of their lives and deaths is thoughtfully (though not sentimentally) noted. Within such a small concentrated circle of humanity, birth and mortality are emphasized, human values are seen in a different perspective than in a larger group, a personality is more apt to be respected for its own sake than it might be in a huge city. These are among the implications of the book: Zona Gale (whose biography Derleth recently wrote) seems to have given August Derleth a motto for his work when, on a visit to Sauk City, recorded in this portion of his journals, she said: "It seems to me that to be really creative one must live in a small place."