Michigan

Sharon said, "For Michigan I would like to suggest A Superior Death by Nevada Barr, one of my favorite authors."

Park ranger Anna Pigeon returns, in a mystery that unfolds in and around Lake Superior, in whose chilling depths sunken treasure comes with a deadly price. In her latest mystery, Nevada Barr sends Ranger Pigeon to a new post amid the cold, deserted, and isolated beauty of Isle Royale National Park, a remote island off the coast of Michigan known for fantastic deep-water dives of wrecked sailing vessels. Leaving behind memories of the Texas high desert and the environmental scam she helped uncover, Anna is adjusting to the cool damp of Lake Superior and the spirits and lore of the northern Midwest. But when a routine application for a diving permit reveals a grisly underwater murder, Anna finds herself 260 feet below the forbidding surface of the lake, searching for the connection between a drowned man and an age-old cargo ship. Written with a naturalist's feel for the wilderness and a keen understanding of characters who thrive in extreme conditions, A Superior Death is a passionate, atmospheric page-turner.

Michigan

Jill said, "Hi, Bonnie: I finished Middlesex for this challenge, which was set in Detroit, Michigan. While I was disappointed with the book, I did learn a lot about Detroit throughout the 20th century, and that part was interesting. Here's my review."

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides was the winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, was nominated for the 2002 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction, and was a 2002 Lambda Literary Award Finalist, Transgender. Just threw that in to counter Jill's disappointment with the book.

In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them, along with Callie's failure to develop, leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.

The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia, back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.

Spanning eight decades and one unusually awkward adolescence, this novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
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Teddy Rose has also reviewed Middlesex.

Michigan

NOLADawn said, "Michigan- Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon."

Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Morrison powerfully evokes in her fiction the legacies of displacement and slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community. Her most widely read novel is perhaps Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Song of Solomon, however, is perhaps the most lyrical of her novels, following Milkman Dead as he struggles to understand his family history and the ways in which that history has both been damaged by and transcended the horror of slavery.