In 2015, I moved to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a world all its own. I live only four blocks from Lake Superior, and I can’t imagine living anywhere without that lake. I pay much more attention to the weather—those waves really crash during Winter storms—and I’ve become more interested in things like geology and local history since moving to such a unique place. Everything I notice eventually enters my poetry, which has become filled with water, shorelines, copper, and white deer. And best of all, our long winters give me a lot of time to read.
After I moved to the Upper Peninsula, I kept hearing about an event referred to as the Italian Hall Disaster in Calumet, Michigan, when over 70 people were killed, most of them children, in 1913.
This book features that event as part of its plot, but it really drew me in because I felt so sympathetic to its main character, Annie Clements. She cares about people, and she cares about justice, and I admired her from the start. I wanted her to succeed even as I sensed she probably would not. She’s one of the few characters I actually grieved for when I finished the book.
From the bestselling and award-winning author of The Sparrow comes “historical fiction that feels uncomfortably relevant today” (Kirkus Reviews) about “America’s Joan of Arc”—the courageous woman who started a rebellion by leading a strike against the largest copper mining company in the world.
In July 1913, twenty-five-year-old Annie Clements has seen enough of the world to know that it’s unfair. She’s spent her whole life in the mining town of Calumet, Michigan, where men risk their lives for meager salaries—and have barely enough to put food on the table for their families. The women labor in the houses of the…
Who knew there had been P.O.W. camps in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula during World War II? Not me, at least not until I read this book. I was intrigued by these characters, mostly Italian soldiers, their American guards, and the local townspeople.
Some of these characters did exactly what I’d do in their circumstances, and some of them made choices that I can’t imagine making. That’s one of the things that makes reading fun for me—meeting characters who make me feel pretty normal and meeting others who make my jaw drop.
In 1944 Italian officer Captain Francesco Verdi is captured by Allied forces in North Africa and shipped to a POW camp in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where the senior POW, the ruthless Kommandant Vogel, demands that all prisoners adhere to his Nazi dictates. His life threatened, Verdi escapes from the camp and meets up with an American woman, Chiara Frangiapani, who helps him elude capture as they flee to the Lower Peninsula. By 1956 they have become Frank and Claire Green, a young married couple building a new life in postwar Detroit. When INS agent James Giannopoulos tracks them down, Frank…
Twelve-year-old identical twins Ellie and Kat accidentally trigger their physicist mom’s unfinished time machine, launching themselves into a high-stakes adventure in 1970 Chicago. If they learn how to join forces and keep time travel out of the wrong hands, they might be able find a way home. Ellie’s gymnastics and…
This book appealed to me because of its strong central character, Helena, who’s carrying around a big secret. Let’s face it—we all have secrets. But most of our secrets are comparatively minor. Helena’s is anything but. Helena’s past is complicated, which makes the plot complicated, just the way I like plots, but the book is still easy enough to follow.
I was interested to see how Helena appreciated some aspects of her past life, even if most people would consider her present life much better. I kept wanting to know more about this imagined place in the U.P., which seemed so strange even though it’s not that far from St. Ignace or Sault Ste. Marie or even the Mackinaw Bridge.
You'd recognise my mother's name if I told it to you. You'd wonder, briefly, where is she now? And didn't she have a daughter while she was missing?
And whatever happened to the little girl?
Helena's home is like anyone else's. With a husband and two daughters, and a job she enjoys. But no one knows the truth about her childhood.
Born into captivity and brought up in an isolated cabin until she was 12, Helena was raised to be a killer by the man who kept her captive - her own father.…
I love the poems in this book, which are all about shipwrecks on the Great Lakes. I was drawn in by the writing itself, which is specific and imagistic. The author does a really good job of imagining the lives of people who worked on these ships.
One of the things I remember most is the description of the various cargoes—peaches, Christmas trees, logs—not to mention the description of a boiler that explodes and crashes through the roof of a funeral home during a funeral. I never realized there were so many ships at the bottom of these lakes. Even reading about such tragedies, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Morgan’s writing is.
A witchy paranormal cozy mystery told through the eyes of a fiercely clever (and undeniably fabulous) feline familiar.
I’m Juno. Snow-white fur, sharp-witted, and currently stuck working magical animal control in the enchanted town of Crimson Cove. My witch, Zandra Crypt, and I only came here to find her missing…
I live right down the street from the “real” Dandelion Cottage (though it has been moved from its original site)! I walk past it nearly every day when I’m out strolling with my pooch. So this book is locally famous.
It’s a children’s book, and I’m hoping one day to read it to grandchildren or great-nieces and nephews. I particularly enjoyed the interactions of the four girls who are the main characters and reading about their interests in the early 20th century.
Mr. Arthur Mackwayte slipped noiselessly into the dining-room and took his place at the table. He always moved quietly, a look of gentle deprecation on his face as much as to say: "Really, you know, I can't help being here: if you will just overlook me this time, by and by you won't notice I'm there at all!" That was how he went through life, a shy, retiring little man, quiet as a mouse, gentle as a dove, modesty personified.
This collection focuses on place, especially northern Michigan and Lake Superior—the author lives four blocks from the lake and immerses herself in it as often as possible (though she admits that until July 4 every year, it’s a little too chilly). The poems are filled with water, sometimes in the form of snow or ice, as well as dragonflies, white deer, and black bears.
Haunted by her choices, including marrying an abusive con man, thirty-five-year-old Elizabeth has been unable to speak for two years. She is further devastated when she learns an old boyfriend has died. Nothing in her life…
In an underground coal mine in Northern Germany, over forty scribes who are fluent in different languages have been spared the camps to answer letters to the dead—letters that people were forced to answer before being gassed, assuring relatives that conditions in the camps were good.
