FICTION REVIEW: "South of Superior"

Ellen Airgood's fiction debut is a warmhearted novel that would be great to take on vacation to while away some leisure hours. It's the story of 35-year-old Madeline Stone, who moves from Chicago to the tiny town of McAllaster along the Lake Superior shore on Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She's offered a job there to take care of an elderly widow and her sister, both of whom know more than she does about her family background.

"A serviceable, capable person with a heart like a volcano," Madeline is at a crossroads in her life, lukewarm about the idea of marrying her fiancé, Richard. Impulsively, she accepts the position of caring for Arbutus, the sweet-natured widowed sister of Gladys Hansen, a feisty and irascible woman with whom Madeline's now deceased grandfather had a decades-long relationship.

Madeline's decision to leave behind her old life as a waitress after the death of her beloved foster mother, Emmy, feels right to her, and she senses a deep kinship for the simple life and the simple folk of the area near where she was born and where she was abandoned as a 3-year-old by her druggie no-good mama. Madeline finds herself in an end-of-the-road outpost on the shore of Desolation Bay, "a foreign, otherworldly place, complete with magic and perils and tests."

She pursues her family's ghosts and puts down roots in McAllaster, where the townspeople rally to support one another: "when there was trouble, there was help," and where she "accidentally acquired something like a father." Along the way she learns some homely lessons about life's unpredictability and the messiness of human relationships. She and Gladys don't always see eye to eye, and Arbutus sometimes needs to mediate. When Madeline manages to sell the Chicago apartment she inherited from her foster mother for enough money to purchase the elderly sisters' Hotel Leppinen, a decaying Victorian charmer with great views of the untamed lake, she knows she's in McAllaster to stay.

She inadvertently becomes a surrogate parent to 5-year-old Greyson Hopkins, whose hapless young mother gets herself in big trouble with the summer folk, and at the close of the book, Madeline makes another big decision, one that seems to promise an idyllic, however harsh and hardworking, new life.

Airgood is well acquainted with intemperate weather, rough water and salt-of-the-earth folk, having herself been a waitress for two decades in an isolated village on the Upper Peninsula coast. This well crafted novel will appeal to readers who loved Jill Conner Browne's Sweet Potato Queens books and Rebecca Wells' "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya- Sisterhood."

Kathryn Lang is former senior editor at Southern Methodist University Press, where she acquired award-winning works of fiction and creative nonfiction for nearly 20 years.