Leelanau Fall reads: a rundown of local new books in 2021-22
From staff reports
The forests are ablaze with color. The nights beckon extra layers of clothing and leave frost in the fields. Soups of squash and root vegetables cook on the stove. The days grow shorter and quieter. Now is the time to cozy up by the fire and read a good book.
Here’s our roundup of local books, or books written by local authors, that were published in late 2021 and 2022. Please find them at Leelanau County’s locally-owned, independent bookstores: Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, Bay Books in Suttons Bay, Dog Ears Books in Northport, and Leelanau Books in Leland; or at your local library.
Lynne Rae Perkins’ Violet & Jobie in the Wild (Greenwillow Books)
Newbery Medal winner Lynne Rae Perkins, who lives in Suttons Bay, introduces Violet and Jobie, two house mice exiled to the wilderness, in an exceptional read-aloud and read-alone for fans of Skunk and Badger,Nuts to You, and classic animal stories such as Stuart Little. This thrilling—and funny!—animal adventure explores themes of friendship, family, bravery, and the meaning of home. Violet & Jobie in the Wild is illustrated in black-and-white throughout by the author.
Brother and sister mice Violet and Jobie live a cozy and comfortable life in a humans’ house, where food is plentiful and the television is good. In fact, Violet, tucked safely behind a book in the bookcase, loves to watch nature programs along with the young boy of the family. The boy’s mother, however, isn’t the biggest fan of mice.
When Violet and Jobie are caught in a trap, the young boy pleads with his mother to release them, and she agrees. Now Violet and Jobie find themselves in tall grasses, under tall trees, surrounded by all kinds of unfamiliar scents and sounds and creatures. In short, they find themselves in the wild. How will they survive?
This short, generously illustrated novel is packed with action, humor, heart, friendship, and surprises. Award-winning author Lynne Rae Perkins’s Violet & Jobie in the Wild will resonate with readers who love books about animals.
Sarah Shoemaker’s Children of the Catastrophe (Harper)
Set amid the backdrop of the massacre of Greeks and Armenians after World War I, local author Shoemaker’s book is a deeply affecting family story of love and survival infused with the rich historical detail and emotional power of Sisters of the Resistance and The Women in the Castle.
It is 1908 and Smyrna is the most cosmopolitan city on the Mediterranean Sea. Though long a part of the Ottoman Empire, Smyrna has always been Greek, and its citizens honor the traditions of previous generations. The Demirigis and Melopoulos families are no different, and now Liana Demirigis will wed the only Melopoulos son, Vassili—a marriage arranged by her parents.
After the wedding, Liana and Vassili build an idyllic life for themselves and their children outside of the city, safe from rising political tensions roiling the region and the world. But less than a decade later, the growing divisions between the Greeks and Turks threaten to boil over. When each country chooses a different side with the outbreak of the Great War, a hunger to reclaim Izmir consumes Greece. Suddenly Liana and her family, like thousands of others like them, are thrust into danger . . . and many will not survive.
Children of the Catastrophe is a beautifully told story that unfolds through the experiences of the Melopoulos family—their loves and quarrels, their hopes and disappointments, played out against a world on fire. Sarah Shoemaker artfully draws us into her characters’ rich lives and evocatively captures all that was lost as hostilities mount and innocent men, women, and children find themselves caught up in forces beyond their control.
Anne-Marie Oomen’s As Long As I Know You: The Mom Book (University of Georgia Press)
Writer Pam Houston once summed it up: “Nice mother-daughter stories are a dime a dozen; pain-in-the-ass mother-daughter stories are the ones that grab us.” As Long as I Know You is a compelling read for any adult grappling with a living elder who might also be a pain in the ass, particularly, any reader who wants a tender take on the lethal combination of dementia and defiance.
As Long as I Know You narrates Empire resident Anne-Marie Oomen’s journey to finally knowing her mother as well as the heartbreaking loss of her mother’s immense capacities. It explores how humor and compassion grow belatedly between a mother and daughter who don’t much like each other. It’s a personal map to find a mother who may have been there all along, then losing her again in the time of Covid. As the millions of women like Oomen’s mother reach their elder years and become the “oldest of the old,” their millions of daughters (and sometimes sons) must come on board, involved in care they may welcome the way they’d welcome hitting a pothole the size of a semi. How a family makes decisions about that pothole, how care continues or does not, how possessions are addressed―really, no one wants the crockpot―and how the relationship shifts and evolves (or not), that story is universal.
Viola Shipman’s The Edge of Summer (Harlequin)
Reminiscent of the complex, uplifting family stories by Nancy Thayer, Sunny Hostin and Mary Alice Monroe, Viola Shipman’s poignant new novel explores the relationship between a curious woman and her secretive mother, taking listeners from their hardscrabble life in the Ozarks to her search for answers along the sparkling shores of Lake Michigan.
Devastated by the sudden death of her mother – a quiet, loving and intensely private Southern seamstress called Miss Mabel, who overflowed with pearls of Ozarks wisdom but never spoke of her own family—Sutton Douglas makes the impulsive decision to pack up and head north to the Michigan resort town where she believes she’ll find answers to the lifelong questions she’s had about not only her mother’s past but also her own place in the world.
Recalling Miss Mabel’s sewing notions that were her childhood toys, Sutton buys a collection of buttons at an estate sale from Bonnie Lyons, the imposing matriarch of the lakeside community. Propelled by a handful of trinkets left behind by her mother and glimpses into the history of the magical lakeshore town, Sutton becomes tantalized by the possibility that Bonnie is the grandmother she never knew. But is she? As Sutton cautiously befriends Bonnie and is taken into her confidence, she begins to uncover the secrets about her family that Miss Mabel so carefully hid, and about the role that Sutton herself unwittingly played in it all.
Jacob Wheeler’s Angel of the Garbage Dump: How Hanley Denning Changed the World, One Child at a Time(Mission Point Press)
Maine-native Hanley Denning, the Angel of the Garbage Dump, saw poverty and desperation in its ugliest form, and refused to turn a blind eye. In the Guatemala City garbage dump she launched an educational reinforcement nonprofit called Safe Passage, or “Camino Seguro,” and helped pull thousands of children out of the teeming filth of one of the largest urban landfills in the Americas.
Many idealistic Americans and Europeans travel to places like Guatemala to learn the local language, engage in humanitarian work, and seek adventure. Most of us return to our comfortable lives. But Denning, a collegiate track star and trained social worker with degrees from Bowdoin and Wheelock College, saw garbage pickers competing with vultures for the food dumped by trucks. She saw toddlers playing amidst rats. The experience changed her. It prompted her to, as Mother Teresa said, “find her own Calcutta.” Hanley called her family in New England and asked them to sell everything she owned and wire the money to Guatemala City.
Hanley was killed in a car accident outside the Guatemalan capital in 2007, but Safe Passage continues to change countless lives today. Glen Arbor Sun editor Jacob Wheeler will hold local book events on October 27 at the Workshop Brewing Company in Traverse City, November 22 at the Suttons Bay Library, and December 7 at the Glen Lake Library in Empire.
Jim Harrison’s The Search for the Genuine (Grove Press)
The first general nonfiction title in 30 years from a giant of American letters, The Search for the Genuine is a sparkling, definitive collection of Jim Harrison’s essays and journalism—some never before published
New York Times bestselling author, and onetime Lake Leelanau resident, Jim Harrison (1937-2016) was a writer with a poet’s economy of style and trencherman’s appetites and ribald humor.
In The Search for the Genuine, a collection of new and previously published essays, the giant of letters muses on everything from grouse hunting fishing to Zen Buddhism and matters of the spirit, including reported pieces on Yellowstone and shark-tagging in the open ocean, commentary on writers from Bukowski to Neruda to Peter Matthiessen, and a heartbreaking essay on life— and, for those attempting to cross in the ever-more-dangerous gaps, death—on the US/Mexico border.
Fred Carlisle’s The Lake Effect: A Lake Michigan Mosaic (Mission Point Press)
The Lake Effect presents Lake Michigan as a mosaic of multiplicity, examining the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of this life-sustaining body of water.
“I stood ankle deep in Lake Michigan for the first time when I was two years old,” Fred Carlisle writes. His fascination with the lake began then and has continued throughout his life.
The Lake Effect is grounded in the author’s personal experiences but moves to wider considerations that include the aesthetic, emotional, historic, economic, and social effects of Lake Michigan.
The book captures the lake’s mesmerizing beauty in summer and winter. It also examines the way Lake Michigan sustains the economies and societies of every place along its shores. It speaks of the ways human intervention and carelessness have polluted, damaged, and degraded the lake. The book also describes the lake’s power—in both water and ice forms—to drown swimmers, wreck ships, destroy beaches, and consume houses.
The Lake Effect explores as well the functions and power of water broadly. Water can be magical and make us healthier, happier, and more peaceful. It can also be an adversary that damages and destroys. Water is equally a comfort and a threat: a mosaic of multiplicity and contradiction.
Carlisle will hold events at the Glen Lake Community Library in Empire on Thursday, October 27 at 7 pm and Bay Books in Suttons Bay on Friday, October 28 at 5 pm.
Maggie & Ryan Hudspeth’s Goodnight Leelanau (Mission Point Press)
Goodnight Leelanau is a children’s book that follows the adventures of Leland, an adorable puppy, who explores Leelanau County—an Up North paradise, full of fun family adventures.
The thoughtful detail within the illustrations will be sure to hit home and bring out precious memories of family vacations, allowing this book to become a tradition of everyone’s own wonderful times Up North. Find Leland the puppy on each page!
The book includes “adventure stops” in: Frankfort, Empire, Glen Arbor, Leland, Northport, Suttons Bay, and Traverse City.
Dave Dempsey’s Great Lakes For Sale (Mission Point Press, 2021)
“Lake Michigan may be coming to Idaho.”
That’s what an Idaho radio commentator said in June 2021. Holding approximately 20% of the world’s surface freshwater, the Great Lakes are once again a target for the drought-ridden West, which is facing climate change, massive fires, and shrinking water supplies. And in a potentially far bigger threat, Wall Street is creating markets that could lead to the trading of freshwaters as a commodity like corn or oil. The Great Lakes are in danger of becoming privately exploited on a large scale by those who have priorities other than stewardship.
In Great Lakes for Sale, Dave Dempsey offers surprising, even controversial, ideas on how to prevent the fulfillment of this nightmare scenario. They include an attack on water commercialization, curbing abuse of the Great Lakes Compact, and devising plans for limited sharing of the Great Lakes to forestall humanitarian disasters. If the Great Lakes are to remain great, new thinking and action will be required.
Tim Mulherin’s Sand, Stars, Wind, & Water: Field Notes from Up North (Mission Point Press, 2021)
In 2011, “Good Morning America” viewers voted Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in northwest lower Michigan the “Most Beautiful Place in America.” Long before the park was ranked as a national favorite, author Tim Mulherin, who spends part of the year near Cedar, began exploring the region — including Leelanau and Grand Traverse counties and other points north — as a frequent visitor. Now, in Sand, Stars, Wind, & Water: Field Notes from Up North, Mulherin tells of his love of the area and its people, and in turn encourages visitors to respect and enjoy this national treasure.
Mulherin joyfully shares his enduring, decades-long friendship with the region, born of hiking and cross-country skiing on woodland trails, dune climbing, trout fishing, sailing across Lake Michigan to camp on South Manitou and Garden islands, kayaking crystalline waters of local lakes and rivers, driving the scenic M-22 highway, and savoring downtime on Lake Michigan beaches. His essays are also a timely commentary on invasive species — both aquatic and human.
Anyone who has visited this special place — or plans to — will find Mulherin’s writing a thoughtful and amusing representation of what being “Up North” is really all about.
Jonathan P. Hawley’s Guardians of the Manitou Passage: A Chronicle of Service to Lake Michigan Mariners, 1840-1915 (Mission Point Press, 2021)
Voices heard from the dark water: “There’s hope! I think I see a flare! Help will be on the way! Lifesavers are on the shore! Our creaking old schooner will be saved, and we will not drown in the icy lake!”
The tranquil waters and pleasant, blue skies of Lake Michigan can quickly change to impenetrable fog and dangerously roiling seas that can drive helpless ships toward shore and likely grounding. In thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was no GPS to aid navigation. On northeastern Lake Michigan’s Manitou Passage, as elsewhere, ship captains and crews counted upon the protection of lightkeepers and lifesavers, whose resourcefulness and bravery enabled them to save countless sailors, ships, and valuable cargoes.
Night and day, lightkeepers maintained fog signals and climbed light stations’ towers to maintain their fragile lenses and other vital apparatus, refuel lamps, and trim wicks. Lifesavers faced nightly beach patrols, station watches, daily boat drills, and practices of other essential procedures. Guardians of the Manitou Passage: A Chronicle of Service to Lake Michigan Mariners, 1840-1915covers the history of the lifesavers and lightkeepers who battled high winds and waves, frigid temperatures and icy shores, during their mission to protect lives on perilous Lake Michigan.
Douglas Alexander’s Still Just Doug: Another Humorous Look at Michigan Courts and the Alaskan Wilds (Mission Point Press, 2021)
Leelanau County author D. Douglas Alexander writes mostly true stories about his varied hunting, life adventures, and legal experiences, usually with a humorous take on them all. From courtrooms across southeast Michigan to the wilderness of Alaska, he takes the reader on a wild ride via varied short stories intended to amuse and provoke thought. Whether fighting the elements in harsh weather or criticizing law enforcement and the judiciary, he never loses his sense of humor, respect for Mother Nature, and the joy of being a father, husband, storyteller, archer, hunter, fisherman, and amateur chef. This collection of stories is eclectic, moving, and intended to entertain and appeal to a broad audience. A former friend denigrated his stories as being “Just Doug,” hence the title.
Mae Keller’s The Farrants of Glen Haven and Empire (Mission Point Press, 2021)
The Farrants of Glen Haven and Empire: A Story Restored, is a lens on the life and times of the Leelanau Peninsula, 1860s–1930s, told through several generations of the Farrant family.
Early French-Canadian immigrants, William and Ezilda Farrant, farmed and managed hotels, including the iconic Sleeping Bear Inn in the National Lakeshore. Their six remarkable children included Eva, the wife of D. H. Day; Ida, a columnist for the Leelanau Enterprise; and Miner, the author’s great-grandfather, whose life chapters take the reader through decades of change in the Leelanau region.
Brought to life by the memories of Frances Farrant, Miner’s daughter, and the author’s grandmother, the book is richly researched with both familial details and historical context. It illuminates social, civic, and economic life in the area. Leelanau historian Andrew White contributed original research into the early history of Glen Haven.
The book captures the hardships, opportunities, and rapid rate of technological and environmental change faced by pioneers when the timber industry came to an end. This is a book both for those with a casual interest in the beautiful Leelanau Peninsula, and for those involved in rediscovering the richly nuanced history of the area.
