Review by Deborah K Frontiera
This children’s picture book, Up North Across the Bridge, depicts a lovely memoir of many vacations in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. The author states in her dedication that her mother “packed up five children, trekked up north and filled our summers with endless joy and adventures …” as have so many families for generation after generation. They all seek the same thing: the beauty of the U.P.’s lakes and shorelines, forests and hills. Endless adventures for children.
Written in smoothly-written verse, the dull long drive leads to what so many of us know: the shoreline cottages/camps, water birds with their babies (swans in the book, but it applies to geese, ducks, and others), beaches, seagulls, cold swims, being towed on a floating tube behind a boat (in my day it was waterskiing), climbing, hiking, pasties, Mackinac Island, bug bites and roasted marshmallows. That is the peace we know and expect in the U.P. and the memories we want to pass on to our children and grandchildren. This picture book goes beyond what children will love. It’s a book for all ages, a keepsake for families visiting our beloved U.P. for the first time, or a book for Grandma and Grandpa to have at camp on the shelf and reread every summer.
Niki Gessler’s illustrations have all the accuracy of photographs but with the softness and peace of her watercolors. The detail in the illustration with the boy picking up firewood and the oversized bugs ready to bite is delightful, especially the enlarged size of the bugs. The same goes for the beach scenes, the Mackinac Bridge in the background, campfires … I felt like I was a part of each scene, as a child, as a parent, and as a grandparent. It’s no wonder the publisher needed to do a second printing of Up North Across the Bridge.
Up North Across the Bridge By Heather Garrison Illustrated by Niki Gessler
ISBN 979-8-9990764-0-3, Cabin By the Bay Publishing, St. Ignace MI, 2025, second printing 2026
