Review by Deborah K. Frontiera On the first read, A Halloween Scare in Michigan is a cute, rhymed with good rhythm children’s picture book aimed at the four-to-eight-year-old set. It has that sing-song type rhyme that kids love and rolls off the tongue with ease. Not all rhymed books achieve…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera Board books are designed for the very youngest children who sit in an adult’s lap being read to, children who may still chew on and rip pages. So, they have few pages and few words on each page. All Aboard! Great Lakes has 18 pages…
Review by Victor R. Volkman Larry Buege’s autobiographical Growing Up in Sparta And Other Adventures is a story in three acts. In the first act, he describes the realities of growing up in the 1950s in a small rural Midwestern town of Sparta, Michigan (population 4,000). As the author points…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera Since this reviewer, who has no talent for the visual arts, and when at her own booth at an art/craft show, often tells people, “I paint with words,” she has deep respect for visual artists in any medium. She also has two siblings in visual…
Review by Brad Gischia Have you ever seen a UFO? Perhaps your grandmother told you a scary story as a child and you later found out that it was true? Ever been for a walk in the woods and felt those little hairs on the back of your neck stand…
Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman As I read John Highlen’s new book Touching the Wild U.P., I became more and more interested in the coincidences of our respective lives. Both Highlen and I were students at Michigan Tech in the late 1980s and had a reverence for the beauty of…
Review by Donna Winters Detail. This is the overriding characteristic of Brave —Nisayenh Ma’iingan, Barry J. Dalberto’s historical novel about Lake Superior and fur trading in the early nineteenth century. He’s great about detailing settings, and sometimes his detail is in the form of a list. Other times, it comes…
MARQUETTE, MI (January 4th, 2022)— the Upper Peninsula Publishers & Authors Association (UPPAA) announces the 3rd Annual U.P. Notable Books List this week. UPPAA board member Mikel Classen (Sault Ste. Marie) initiated the effort as a response to the lack of representation of U.P. writers in other Michigan state literary…
Review by Victor R. Volkman Reprinted from Marquette Monthly with permission More than sixty years on, the book (and later the film) Anatomy of a Murder continues to fascinate people. Why is that? Well, first and foremost it introduced the genre of “realistic courtroom drama” to American readers and its…
Review by Tyler Tichelaar Laurium, Michigan resident David Crowley’s debut novel The Secret of St. Christopher’s Girls School is a murder mystery full of shocking revelations that take place at a Catholic girls school and convent. The story begins when Sister Margaret Mary is found murdered. Detective Steve McLean is…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera As the back cover states, Debt and Disregard: A Superior Point Novel is about “the hard-drinking, rough talking, and sexually pragmatic inhabitants of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with characters defined by the region where they live.” While there certainly are people like those in the story…
Reviewed by Victor R. Volkman Reprinted from Marquette Monthly (09/2021) with permission At age 45, Jan found herself at a crossroads when her orderly life drifted off course. A devastating divorce without warning and the sudden death of her mother made her realize it was time to make her dreams…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera To begin this review, it is important to keep in mind that classic novels are very different from modern novels. Classics are short on action and “showing” scenes and long on backstory, detailed descriptions and explanations. In Olav Audunssøn, the lengthy details revolve around the…
Reviewed by Hannah Brinza Deborah Frontiera’s new book Superior Tapestry sets itself the task of weaving together the history of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Those of you familiar with Deborah’s work may recall her novella Midnight in the Pawn Shop, in which objects at the pawn shop come to life and…
Review by Brad Gischia There are many books that detail the history of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. These are often rigorously researched and documented (some may be less so) and they represent an important aspect of the way we understand this strange little corner of the world. The SideRoad…
Review by Deborah K. Frontiera In U.P. Colony, Phil Belffy asked himself why Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, was doing so much better economically than Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, some thirty-plus years ago and ended up writing his master’s thesis on that topic. His search for answers led him to compare…
Review by Tyler Tichelaar The wait is over. Fans of Ellen Airgood’s South of Superior have waited a decade for her new novel Tin Camp Road. In the interim, Airgood published two young adult novels, Prairie Evers and its sequel The Education of Ivy Blake, but this is her first…
New Book Weaves Together Ojibwe, Duluth, and Family History Gichigami Hearts: Stories and Histories from Misaabekong by Linda LeGarde Grover is a potpourri of Ojibwe legends, family history, and regional history all interconnected to ask questions about what it means to be Ojibwe, to live in Duluth, to grow up…
