Having entered the winter season, let
me recommend South of Superior by Ellen Airgood, as
the perfect hot chocolate and fireplace read; or if you prefer another season,
the perfect book to read on the dock or in the shade of an oak tree, on a hot
summer day.
The novel is set in the town of McAllaster on the south
shore of Lake Superior, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s the type of town people from Chicago,
Milwaukee, Green Bay, and other larger Midwestern cities flock to during the
summer. The truly adventurous ones
return with snowmobiles and go ice-fishing during the winter. But the book is not about them, it is about
McAllaster’s year-round residents, people who have lived in the town all their
lives.
Their story is told through the eyes of Madeline Stone, a
native, who was abandoned by her mother and given up by her grandfather at age
three, to be raised by a dear family friend named Emmy in far away Chicago. As the book begins, Madeline is still emotionally
exhausted from caring for Emmy, the only person who has ever cared for her, who
has recently died of cancer. How
Madeline returns to McAllaster as an adult is a bit implausible as a storyline,
but it works. She had no intention of
doing so, holding a lifelong bitterness toward her deceased grandfather,
resentful over the family life she never had.
Then one day a letter arrives from a woman named Gladys, who
she knows only as someone who had lived with her grandfather. Gladys, knowing that Madeline had cared for
Emmy through her illness, asks that Madeline return to McAllaster to help care
for Gladys’ sister Butte. The sisters
are elderly, and Gladys is not able to handle the physical demands of
care-giving for Butte.
Unhappy with her current situation, Madeline moves “home” to
a town she does not know, taking her bitterness with her. The rest of the novel tells how she comes to
know its people, and starts to understand how it was she was given away as a
child.
To describe the book in shorthand, it is a cross between The Waltons and This Old House. [I know it doesn’t fit my image, but I’m a major
Waltons fan.] The book is as
heartwarming as you will find in current literature; an excellent read.
My grandfather was one of the pioneers of UP area south of Marquette in the 1960's where there was just a few cabins for game hunters and a lot and lot of woodland. I remember no direct roadway route to his 3 cabin deer hunting property.
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