Tips on spending Santa’s bookstore gift cards this season

If you were one of the lucky ones who got a gift card from a local bookstore this holiday season, here are some ideas for books to spend it on.

OK, I was wrong. I wasn’t gung-ho for Ann Patchett’s newest book, “Tom Lake.” Since it has now appeared on almost every list of best books of 2023 (The New York Times, NPR) I have been forced to reassess my take.

The book is clever. COVID isolation finds a family sheltering in place in Michigan’s cherry country as they go about the day-to-day chores of harvesting the season’s crop.  Three daughters bug their mom about a summer she spent performing at a local summer playhouse and learning to make difficult choices.

They only know that their mother had a summer fling with an actor who would parlay his summer stock experience into becoming a major heart-throb movie star.

The daughters want to know more about that time in their mother’s life, and over the harvest season, she fills them in. In pure Shakespearean style, the readers only learn about the good stuff as their mom relives this exciting period of her life when she was madly in love for the first time.

Without question, Patchett is a beautiful writer, but I have two objections. One is cosmetic: The book jacket is awful, and there were so many wonderful things that could have been done to tie in the beauty of northwestern Michigan. I get the use of daisies, and so will you, but cherry blossoms are cooler.

The second is that the book’s final 10% tries to wrap up too many plot points in a bow like a Grisham thriller.

Other books I can suggest (and I’ve interviewed these authors) are the mysteries “Under the Ashes,” by East Lansing author Charles Cutter, and “Ghosts of Lost Dreams,” by Ron Erskine. Both authors are late in their careers and have used their life experiences — Cutter as a lawyer and a radio station executive, Erskine as a large-animal veterinarian — to write clever and engaging murder mysteries. Erskine’s focus is Amish country in Pennsylvania, while Cutter draws us into the Leelanau area, this time with a murder that may have been the result of a false morel mushroom poisoning. Both will have you looking for the author’s previous works.

Until Matthew J. VanAcker took on the task, no one had ever looked at Lansing’s central role in the Civil War. His book “Lansing and the Civil War” isn’t just for historians. Through its focus on average Lansing residents who fought for the North, VanAcker tells the engaging story of the 500 men who fought to save the Union.

Lansing author Erin Bartels keeps getting better and better. Her newest book, “Everything is Just Beginning,” follows a young couple as they break into the Detroit music industry. It’s also a love story that may or may not happen, and you won’t know until the end because success threatens to drive the couple apart. Bartels’ love of music shines through as she explores her penchant for writing about “things you cannot change.”

Susie Finkbeiner, a former Lansingite now living in Western Michigan, takes readers on a young girl’s journey to play professional baseball in her 2023 book, “The All American.”  You will feel like you’re in the stands, cheering on the young athlete. Finkbeiner also peppers the book with how the “Red Scare” destroyed people’s lives while exploring what many mistakenly believe was a simpler time.

Audrey Farley, who is becoming noted for her writing on how the medical world has dealt with complex societal norms, has written her newest book, “Girls and Their Monsters,” about the Lansing Morlok quadruplets. Farley pulls back the curtains on the often terrible and challenging lives of these young girls in the mid-20th century, revealing secrets few Lansing residents knew, despite tons of media coverage in their lifetime. The book is a tough read, detailing some horrific secrets and questioning the complicity that everyone has with the worship of celebrities. Farley worked closely with the only living Morlok quadruplet, Sarak Morlok Cotton, forming a friendship that becomes obvious while reading the book.

These books should keep you busy until Bonnie Jo Campbell arrives in town to promote her new rural noir book, “The Waters,” which is due out in January.