Books Set in Michigan

Funny Story     Emily Henry     (2024)  I had missed Emily Henry’s bestseller boat until I picked up this romance novel that some reviewers say is her best yet. The plot of Funny Story revolves around two tropes of the romance genre: fake dating and friends-to-lovers. Daphne’s fiancé, Peter, dumps her right before their wedding, and Daphne has to find a place to live quickly. Peter’s new girlfriend has also dumped her boyfriend, Miles, who has a spare room in his apartment that he offers to Daphne. She pegs Miles as a scruffy pothead, but she takes the room, since she knows little about (the fictional) Waning Bay, Michigan, where she relocated at the insistence of Peter. Got it? The one good thing in Daphne’s life is that she loves her work as a children’s librarian. And then Miles introduces her to the summertime grandeur of their lakeside town and its environs. The Daphne/Miles plot plays out with glittery dialogue (how could ordinary people come up with so many one-liners?) and some explicit sex scenes. Along the way, readers get a tour of the area around Traverse City, Michigan—the pristine Lake Michigan beaches, the sand dunes, the wineries, the farmers’ markets, the festivals. The characters tend to overanalyze themselves, but I raced through all 384 pages of Funny Story, inhaling the Michigan charm.

On this website I’ve reviewed many other books set in Michigan. Here are brief recaps of some of those reviews.

Tom Lake     Ann Patchett     (2023)  In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, three young adult daughters of a family are hunkered down at their childhood home, a cherry and apple farm in Michigan, helping harvest the crops. They beg their mother to tell the full story of her summer romance with movie star Peter Duke, which took place back in 1988 when Duke was a struggling young actor. The mother obliges, and the novel toggles between 1988 and 2020. Novelist Patchett could ask for compensation from the Michigan Travel Commission, given her glowing descriptions of the state’s natural beauty, especially the area around Traverse City.

Adventures of a Girl Architect     Hazel Harzinger     (2018)  Smart and hardworking Elena Troye is determined to become a practicing architect. In this witty, fast-paced novel, she recounts the ups and downs of breaking into a male-dominated profession. After a disastrous studio review at the University of Michigan, there's the seeming triumph of landing a job in glitzy, booming Las Vegas in 2006. When the national recession deepens in 2009, Elena returns to the Midwest for grad school and then the grueling architecture licensing exams. Along the way, she balances the professional with the personal—boyfriends, family ties, friendships. And she maintains her interest in fashion, even if that seems “girly.” In the workplace world of 2011-2014, Elena battles harassment from her superiors and mud on construction sites. She never gives up her dream of designing beautiful, functional buildings—and finding romantic happiness. Elena calls herself a “Girl Architect” with ironic self-mockery as she defies gender stereotypes. Click here to order Adventures of a Girl Architect by Michigan author Hazel Harzinger.

Hunter’s Moon     Philip Caputo     (2019)  In seven linked short stories, Caputo summons up the wild allure of the far northern regions of the United States. Six of the stories take place in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, which hovers around the 46th parallel of latitude, and the seventh is set even farther north, in Alaska. Each story revolves in some way around hunting or fishing: the appeal of rugged terrain, the terror of getting lost, and the reality of weapons violence. I don’t hunt, and I don’t understand the technicalities of rifles, but as you read Hunter’s Moon you can set those components aside and revel in Caputo’s descriptions of the natural world.

Mysteries by Aaron Stander (2000-2020)  The sand dunes, the sunsets, the resiny scent of pine forests: Michiganders will recognize that Stander’s eleven murder mysteries are set in the northwest section of the Lower Peninsula. The main detective is Sheriff Ray Elkins, a rumpled middle-aged former professor of criminal justice from downstate who has retreated to the North Woods where he was raised. He’s surrounded by a distinctive cast of year-round residents, who disdain the vacationers renting beach houses during the glorious warm months. The many state references will tickle those who, like me, cherish our nation’s third (Great Lakes) coast. Small Michigan details drop in on almost every page. Click here for more of my reviews of books in this series.

We Hope for Better Things     Erin Bartels     (2019)  Interracial relationships are the theme of Erin Bartels’ multi-century historical novel. In the present-day chapters, white Detroit journalist Elizabeth Balsam, following up on a lead about unpublished photos of the 1967 Detroit riots, ends up at her great-aunt Nora’s farmhouse in Lapeer, about an hour’s drive north of the city. A different layer of Elizabeth’s family history is revealed in chapters set in Lapeer in 1861, when the farmhouse was a stop for slaves fleeing on the Underground Railroad. That title? It’s from the motto for the city of Detroit: Speramus meliora; resurget cineribus. “We hope for better things; it will rise from the ashes.”

Beautiful Music      Michael Zadoorian     (2018)  This is the touching story of a high school freshman at Redford High School, on Detroit’s far northwest side, in the early 1970s—a period of increasing racial tension and violence in the city. Danny Yzemski is a sweet, shy kid who’s bullied in school and beleaguered at home. His coming-of-age is aided by his discovery of the transformative power of hard rock music. The detailed descriptions of Danny’s neighborhood along the Grand River corridor—the routes he took, the stores he frequented—re-create the era precisely. Even the breakfast cereals that Danny eats are authentic to the period. For vintage Detroit flavor, tune in to Beautiful Music.

There’s nonfiction set in Michigan, also, as in this dual biography:

The Kelloggs:  The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek     Howard Markel     (2017)  In the small southwestern Michigan city of Battle Creek, two brothers distinguished themselves in separate but related arenas. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943), a physician and author, established the Battle Creek Sanitarium in 1878, treating thousands of patients and promoting some surprisingly prescient wellness regimens on both dietary and exercise fronts. In 1906, Will Keith Kellogg (1860-1951) founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, now the Kellogg Company, revolutionizing breakfast foods through manipulation of ingredients and industrial mass production. Click here for my full review.

Settings: Traverse City, St Louis, Chicago

Tom Lake     Ann Patchett     (2023)  In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, three young adult daughters of a family are hunkered down at their childhood home, a cherry and apple farm in Michigan, helping harvest the crops. They beg their mother to tell the full story of her summer romance with movie star Peter Duke, which took place back in 1988 when Duke was a struggling young actor. The mother obliges, and the novel toggles between 1988 and 2020. Much of the plot centers on stage productions of Thornton Wilder’s play Our Town, so if you haven’t read or seen the play in a while, it will help if you brush up before starting Tom Lake. That said, the unfolding of the mother’s tale and its connection to the family’s status more than 30 years later are engrossing, with small and large revelations along the way. Novelist Patchett could ask for compensation from the Michigan Travel Commission, given her glowing descriptions of the state’s natural beauty, especially the area around Traverse City, in the northwest quadrant of the Lower Peninsula. (See my review of another Patchett novel here.)

The Altruists     Andrew Ridker     (2019)  An untenured visiting/adjunct professor at a fictitious university in St Louis asks his two adult children to come home from NYC for a weekend. It’s not because he misses them—he’s facing unemployment and needs to have funds from them to bail out the mortgage on the family home. This intimate family drama looks back on pivotal scenes from the 1970s to the recent past, exploring issues of grief, parenting, and, yes, altruism. What do we want to make of our lives? How do we look back from our later years on our choices? How do our finances enter in? Arthur Alter and his children Ethan and Maggie try to answer all these questions as they grope for closure after the death of the matriarch of the family, Francine. Quibbles: I do wish that the novelist’s editor had axed some of his many flawed uses of the word “begrudging.” And the depiction of Maggie’s self-sacrificing lifestyle is somewhat mocking. Overall, though, this is a well-crafted, thought-provoking study of family dynamics.  

Wellness     Nathan Hill     (2023)  I noted in my review of Nathan Hill’s previous novel, The Nix, that Hill is exceedingly verbose. He hasn’t trimmed it down any in Wellness, but I still read all 597 pages, even his 45-page treatise (gasp) on the algorithms of Facebook. The novel’s main characters, Jack and Elizabeth, are very endearing people, whom we first meet when they are in college in Chicago in the early 1990s. I kept reading to find out how they fared over the years, in their relationship and in their city. Some chapters travel back to their childhoods, but the focus of the novel is in the early 2010s, when Jack and Elizabeth are approaching middle age and dealing with finances, parenting, and careers. (He’s an adjunct art professor, and she’s a researcher in psychology.) In some ways, Wellness is a profoundly sad book, but the novelist probes deeply into his characters’ psyches, and those characters prove resilient even in the face of tragedy.

Two Fiction + Two Nonfiction

First, two works of fiction, both about financiers:

Trust     Hernan Diaz     (2022)  Diaz explores the trustworthiness of narrative through four different takes on the same story, about a fictional early-twentieth-century Wall Street financier. First, a novella captures the style of Edith Wharton, then an unfinished autobiography reveals its author’s vanity and arrogance. A memoir by the autobiography’s ghost writer gives another perspective, and finally the diary of the financier’s wife provides a new twist to the tale. Diaz navigates these disparate genres with stylistic ease, as he asks, Whom do you trust to tell you the truth?

The Magnolia Palace     Fiona Davis     (2022)  I reviewed Davis’s 2016 novel, The Dollhouse, on this blog in 2017, and The Magnolia Palace is the fifth novel that Davis has churned out since then. Her signature formula includes an actual iconic building in New York City as the setting and two fictional young women, living decades apart, who are involved in a complicated mystery. The Magnolia Palace is a lightweight, entertaining romp, set in the Frick Collection, a fine art museum that was formerly the home of Henry Clay Frick’s family. The two women are models, one in 1919 and one in 1966. Brush up on your art history!

Next, two collections of essays:

These Precious Days     Ann Patchett     (2022) Patchett provides plenty of  insights into her family background and her fiction-writing process in these essays. (See my reviews of her novels Commonwealth and The Dutch House.) The title piece, and the longest, starts with Patchett reading Tom Hanks’s short story collection, Uncommon Type. She admires the book (as did I; see my review) and, through a series of coincidences, gets to know the actor and his assistant, Sooki Raphael. Sooki ends up as a long-term houseguest of Patchett and her husband at the beginning of the pandemic. Patchett writes a moving account of their unexpected and rewarding friendship.

Happy-Go-Lucky     David Sedaris     (2022)  For fans of David Sedaris (count me in), every new collection of his essays means a couple of evenings of sure-fire good reading, unveiling the vagaries of family relationships. (See my previous commentary on his body of work.) Happy-Go-Lucky focuses quite a bit on the last years of David’s nonagenarian father, Lou, and on the impact of the COVID pandemic. The stories are honest, touching, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes disturbing. There is simply no other essayist who is as irreverent and candid and downright funny as David Sedaris.