I received this book free from Net Galley and University of Wisconsin Press in exchange for this honest review. It will be available for purchase on September 18, 2018.

Conceptually this story has great promise. The Great Lakes are where important American naval battles have taken place, and yet very little fiction is set there. This reviewer lived near Lake Erie for most of the 1980s, and I thought this novel would be a sure fire winner.

An elderly woman is looking back at her life, and the story starts with her earliest memories, when her parents separate and her father, a sea captain, takes her from her unstable mother and the girl goes to sea with him. Sailors mutter dark things. There’s a ghost ship that the crew speaks of ominously.

Zacharias nails Fern’s developmental stages, which is critical for anyone writing about a child, particularly if that child is going to voice some of the narrative. Failing to do so breaks the spell entirely, and I am cheered when I see it done correctly. There’s also a great deal of painstaking historical and nautical detail here. As a history teacher I appreciate it, and I learned some things.

Sadly, the character feels weighted down by the setting instead of developed by it. I never feel as if I know the protagonist, but rather as though the author has a great deal of research done and is going to use as much of it as is humanly possible. I pushed my way through it until just before the halfway mark, and then I abandoned ship.

No doubt if you live near Lake Michigan or are familiar with it, you will connect with this story, but even if you don’t know much about it like me, you might find this to be a captivating story as I did. 1936 in Michigan, Fern is 5 years old and taken on the ferry which carries railroad cars across Lake Michigan with her father who is the Captain. He takes her with him because her mother isn’t able to take care of her after losing a second child before giving birth . An adventure in her eyes, albeit a dangerous one crossing the frozen lake for a five year old roaming the boat. Fern at the beginning of the story is 85 going back in time to that trip. So this is in many ways is about memories, about how valid those memories might be, what we remember, what we choose to forget. The reader is posed with a dilemma- how reliable of a narrator is she when she says:

“But isn’t it also strange that I should remember nearly every moment of that journey when I have forgotten so much else? Some people say that the distant past comes back to them as if it were yesterday, but those days in the Manitou do not come back to me like yesterday, they come back like today, like this very minute, the way a book springs back to life and happens all over again, with all its colors and smells, the raw sorrow for each setback and joyin it’s triumphs p, every time you take it off the shelf.”

“ I have read that the memories that seen most familiar to is, the ones we most often visit, are in fact our least accurate, for each time we review them we change them, revisions so subtle we’re unaware of making them, until the more we seem to remember, the less we actually do. But what happens to the memories you suppress, the ones you can’t bear to visit waking, and so do they come to you in dreams ? ....in calling up the past, memory always lies.”

“Maybe nothing I remember is quite right.”

Fern with great detail tells the story of those days at sea, interspersed with her present at 85. While from the beginning she questions her memory, what she remembers is a sometimes sad and touching story of a young girl trying to make sense of the things around her, not just on the ferry, but her life before and after that trip. Losing her mother, coming to terms with her father’s intermittent presence, her connection on the ferry to a young boy named Alv, and facing the ghosts of her past. At 70 years old when he husband is gone and her children are grown, she returns to the place of her childhood, her home. Her children don’t understand why but Fern’s connection to this place, this lake, is a deep connection that the reader comes to understand as she reveals the burden she has carried all these years of one fateful day. This is well written; you almost feel as if you are on the boat, can see the ice, feel the cold, are in the mind of a five year old experiencing her awe, her desire for the adventure, her fear. And then in the thoughts of a woman who holds these memories.

I received an advanced copy of this book from U of Wisconsin Press through NetGalley.

I have been hitting home runs on my choices from NetGalley and the publishers lately. This is above a 5***** book, it is over 10 stars. This was an e-book so I had to read on my tablet, I rarely mark passages, nor do I go back to re-read the page several times, not so with this one. There are pages in this book which are written so beautifully, they are poetic, awe-inspiring. I found Fern’s description of her father around page 23 to be one of the first oh-wow moments. Many more followed.
This is a beautiful book, the story is being told by Fern, who is now in her mid-eighties, she is recalling her trip on her father’s ship at age 5 and then little bits of her life in between to age 85. She has recently moved “back home” to the place she loved so much as a child. I cannot even begin to provide a description of the quality of the writing style in this story, it is one of the most thought provoking and emotional I have ever read. I loved every minute of it and rarely do I read books twice, but I will certainly be sitting down on a cold wintry day this winter and picking this one back up again.
The descriptions are done so well, you can envision all of the crew on the Manitou sitting down to eat, can see the rail cars down in the hold, feel the cold, see the ice and hear the engines revving to back up and once more try to go over the windrow. You can picture the captain in his uniform, the way he walks, the way he talks.
The most special part of this book was how the author would drop a hint, just a little one, in the middle of a paragraph that would clue you in that something was going to happen, but she did not give the story line up until the end. I don’t believe I have ever seen it done so well in any other book I’ve read, until now. It was awesome.
On another note, I absolutely learned so much about the shipping of actual rail cars across the Great Lakes in the 1930’s and beyond, I had no idea they did that. Even though this is a work of fiction, the research for this timeframe, the clothing, the speech, the ships that met a sad demise, and the actual way a ship’s crew would interact was so commendable and believable.
This is a beautiful book, I know, I’ve said that several times. I highly recommend to anyone, I feel thankful I picked this one to read, it was the book cover that first drew me in. Thank you Lee Zacharias, well done.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from University Wisconsin Press through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Fern.is five when she leaves her sick mother behind and boards her father's boat, The Manitou. Her mother cannot care for her and her father is the Captain of the boat and has to be on board, so he takes her. This book even though fiction, makes you feel the feelings of a young girl's adventures on her Father's boat. She gets to know the crewman, the nice ones and the not so nice ones. Above all you feel the love this girl has for Michigan and the great lakes and her hometown of Frankfort. Very interesting. The Author is very descriptive of what she feels, and hears, and sees. Reccomend.

This beautifully written new book by Lee Zacharias spoke to my soul. It was so well written that I not only followed the story but felt like I was part of the story - I was cold in the ice, hot in the fire and seasick during the storm. If I could give it more than five stars, I would definitely do it!

This novel mainly takes place during the winter of 1936 when the captain of a lake ferry takes his 5 year old daughter Fern with him across Lake Michigan to deliver train cars to Wisconsin. The ice is heavy on the big lake and they face dangerous weather and the possibility of damage from the ice, but at 5 Fern only sees the adventure of being on the great vessel unsupervised and able to explore as much as she wants to. She manages to make friends with many of the crew members including a young deckhand who helps take care of her and also makes friends with a cat that she finds in the train area and a ghost who comes to her room at night. We also see Fern at different parts of her life and learn how this one lake crossing affected the rest of her life.

I read this book slowly so that I wouldn't miss a word of the beautiful writing. I grew up in Michigan and am familiar with the central area of the book which made it even more magical for me but you don't have to be a Michigander to enjoy this book. I already know that this book is going to be one of my top books for this year.

Thanks to netgalley for a copy of this book to read and review. All opinions are my own.

5 stars

I read the PDF edition.

It is 1936 in Northern Michigan as our story begins.

When Fern Halvorsen was five years old, she was to go on a memorable ferry trip with her father Henrik, the Captain of the large boat. He and his wife had lost a child, and she couldn’t get out of bed to take care of Fern. So Henrik takes her with him on the train ferry across Lake Michigan. Along the way, they hear of an ice-locked ship. They are on their way to rescue it.

Fern is fascinated with the boat. She wants to see everything. She makes a friend of a young man named Alv. He takes her on tours of the boat when he is not on duty. She talks to all of the men and most like her, but a couple of them are short with her. She wants to be a ferry-person when she grows up.

Now in her eighty-fifth year, Fern recalls the trip across the lake. She felt a ghost in her room and saw the ghost ship several of the crew saw in the distance. She recalls the kitten she finds in the bottom of the ship. She talks to her father more than she ever has before.

This is a wonderful novel. Fern is a very memorable character. Lee Zacharias tells a story from Fern’s point of view and has the thought process of a five-year old girl down beautifully. The story is told in simple, but wonderful language. I liked Fern very much, as well as the rest of the main characters in this story.

I want to thank NetGalley and the University of Wisconsin Press for forwarding to me a copy of this absolutely wonderful book to read, enjoy and review.