{F} rank Capra’s 1946 film It’s a Wonderful Life has become a cultural touchstone. Underappreciated in its original release, the Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed Christmas masterpiece gained new life when its copyright expired. Thanks to repeated yuletide airings, the story of George Bailey (Stewart) is now so familiar and so beloved that it barely needs recounting: A man of frustrated ambition constantly thwarted in his desire to leave his small upstate New York town is, after a series of personal misfortunes, on the brink of taking his own life. Then, on Christmas Eve, a guardian angel visits him to prove how truly wonderful his life has been by showing him a world in which he was never born.

Some may think It’s a Wonderful Life is cheesy (“Capra-corn,” as some belittled the director’s sentimentality). Others might even (wrongly) think it is now somehow problematic. But count me among the millions annually drawn in by its heartfelt message, its stirring performances, and its fully realized fictional setting of Bedford Falls. The tributes to It’s a Wonderful Life include more than just its cultural pervasiveness. The town of Seneca Falls, which inspired Bedford Falls, holds a festival annually in the movie’s honor.

The movie is powerful enough that some may be sad to leave its setting, and to follow its “what if?” with a “what next?” In one Saturday Night Live sketch, presented as the movie’s “Lost Ending,” George discovers that Henry F. Potter, a scheming rival businessman, was directly responsible for his culminating woes, and leads an angry mob to beat him up. “You made one mistake, Mr. Potter,” a note-perfect Dana Carvey intones in Stewart’s singular patois. “You double-crossed me, and you left me alive.”

The SNL sketch is amusing because it is so unlike the George Bailey we know and the It’s a Wonderful Life we have seen. Yet it still takes for granted the movie’s cultural cachet, and is thus its own kind of appreciation. In 2014, Anne Morse made a more serious attempt at imagining life for the Baileys after that fateful Christmas Eve. Her novel Bedford Falls: The Story Continues is an occasionally forced but nonetheless sincere and uplifting way to honor It’s a Wonderful Life.

Some aspects of Bedford Falls are familiar. There’s the titular town itself. Many of the movie’s main characters reappear, albeit now all grown up, with children and grandchildren of their own. The story even centers on someone named George Bailey, grandson of the one we know.

But much is also different this time around. Sixty-two years after that fateful night, and 18 years after the original George Bailey’s death, Bedford Falls is not what it once was. “The town hasn’t been the same since he died,” says a still-living Mary Bailey: The sort of economic depredation and social anomie her husband worked so tirelessly to prevent have set in. The Bailey clan, though sprawling, has itself not been without tragedy. Morse was striving for verisimilitude. “In real life, bad things happen to good families,” she told Kathryn Jean Lopez in 2014.

Yet one of the worst things to happen to a Bailey, he did to himself. The second George Bailey, though largely raised by his grandparents, lived the life his grandfather once coveted. He left Bedford Falls early and never looked back; he didn’t even like visiting the place, which “bored” him. He became a prosperous (and occasionally corner-cutting) developer in New York City, with all the trappings of wealth . . . yet in an increasingly tenuous marriage, and distant from his two troubled children. When (inevitably) the angel Clarence (now with wings) appears to George during his moment of crisis, it’s not to show him how wonderful his life has been. Rather: “I came down to tell you that you’ve lived a terrible life,” the angel says. Clarence has, moreover, come not because a whole town is praying for George, but because only one person is.

This inversion makes Bedford Falls a lot more like its spiritual predecessor, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. (Indeed, this George Bailey is even known as “Scrooge Bailey” to some.) It also deprives Morse’s sequel of some of the freshness and subtlety of Capra’s original, as well as some of its power. Showing the consequences of certain actions Bailey the Second never took induces a bit more of a remove than the dire results of his grandfather’s nonexistence. Questionable storytelling choices and a directness in theme and message that can lack subtlety are also flaws.

But the earnestness at the root of this directness is the great strength of Bedford Falls. Every page is replete with a love of It’s a Wonderful Life. Fun and credible extrapolations from its story (Janie, playing the piano in its climactic scene, becomes a pianist; little Zuzu is now the active moral center of the clan) fill this sequel with life. Smaller references (such as to those famous “Buffalo Gals”) help furnish its details. Morse combines these with an authentic depiction of familial warmth that captures, for example, the “joyful chaos” of relatives together at Christmas, and the bittersweet aura of a loved one’s final moments.

So if Morse’s sequel is sometimes a little on the nose, one is inclined to forgive its faults. A worthwhile message shines through: “We simply have to do the best we can in the situation we find ourselves in. We need to remember that our families, our friends, our communities — yes, even strangers and generations yet unborn — have claims on us.” By lovingly continuing the world of Bedford Falls, Morse has also upheld the legacy of Frank Capra’s lovely film.