The Crystal Falls Community District Library, in partnership with the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association, has scheduled author events with winners of the U.P. Notable Book List. The next event is with Linda LeGarde Grover, author of “In the Night of Memory,” whose “captivating novel about the lives and struggles of two separated sisters in a Native American family in the fictional Mozhay Point Reservation will resonate with anyone who has experienced a broken family,” the UPPAA said in a news release.

The events are free and open to all Upper Peninsula residents. The Jan. 13 event will begin at 7 p.m. and be shown via Zoom. Participants are asked to contact Evelyn Gathu in advance at egathu@uproc.lib.mi.us, or 906-875-3344. The UPPAA recommends individuals borrow a copy of the book from a local library or purchase it from a local bookseller in advance to get the most out of the event.

According to UPPAA, LeGarde Grover is professor emeritus of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and a member of the Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe. Her novel, “The Road Back to Sweetgrass,” received the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers Fiction Award as well as the Native Writers Circle of the Americas First Book Award.

“The Dance Boots,” a book of stories, received the Flannery O’Connor Award and the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize, and her poetry collection titled “The Sky Watched: Poems of Ojibwe Lives” received the Red Mountain Press Editor’s Award and the 2017 Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for Poetry.

“In the Night of Memory,” to be featured in the Jan. 13 U.P. Notable Book Club session, focuses on sisters in a Native American family in the fictional Mozhay Point Reservation. The event is open to all Upper Peninsula residents free of charge. (Photo courtesy of the Upper Peninsula Publishers and Authors Association)

“Onigamiising: Seasons of an Ojibwe Year” won the 2018 Minnesota Book Award for Memoir and Creative Nonfiction and the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award.

The UPPAA provided a synopsis of “In Night of Memory.”

“When Loretta surrenders her young girls to the county and then disappears, she becomes one m

ore missing Native woman in Indian Country’s long devastating history of loss,” it said. “But she is also a daughter of the Mozhay Point Reservation in northern Minnesota and the mother of Azure and Rain, ages 3 and 4, and her absence haunts all the lives she has touched — and all the stories they tell in this novel.”

The book, which received the Northeastern Minnesota Book Award for fiction and a U.P. Notable Book Award from the UPPAA, returns to the fictional reservation of Grover’s previous award-winning books, introducing readers to a new generation of the Gallette family as Azure and Rain make their way home, UPPAA said.

“After a string of foster placements, from cold to kind to cruel, the girls find their way back to their extended Mozhay family, and a new set of challenges, and stories, unfolds. Deftly, Grover conjures a chorus of women’s voices (sensible, sensitive Azure’s first among them) to fill in the sorrows and joys, the loves and the losses that have brought the girls and their people to this moment,” UPPAA said. “Though reconciliation is possible, some ruptures simply cannot be repaired; they can only be lived through, or lived with.

“‘In the Night of Memory’ creates a nuanced, moving, often humorous picture of two Ojibwe girls becoming women in light of this lesson learned in the long, sharply etched shadow of Native American history.”

Local author Tyler Tichelaar, whose books include “Kawbawgam: The Chief, The Legend, The Man,” penned a review of “In the Night of Memory” in the U.P. Book Review.

“Anyone who has lost a loved one — whether to drugs, mental illness or unexpected death — will testify to the truths encapsulated in these pages,” Tichelaar wrote. “I hope ‘In the Night of Memory’ becomes a classic of Native American and American literature because it so perfectly captures a time and place in our history and preserves it for us, hopefully reminding us not to repeat the past.”

Tichelaar called the book “realistic fiction at its finest.”

“It takes a little work to get into it, but then it opens up and blossoms in surprising ways,” he wrote. “The reader might be a little confused early on at the plethora of Ojibwa relations the girls have and how to keep them all straight. To some degree, it felt like going to a family reunion and meeting a family you never knew you had and finding some of its members are rather dysfunctional.”

However, he noted Grover provides family trees of all the characters, which clarified the tale.

“I felt like Azure and Rain myself as I adapted to the novel and made sense of who is who and came to appreciate these people,” Tichelaar said.

More information about the U.P. Notable Book list, U.P. Book Review and UPPAA can be found at www.UPNotable.com.

The UPPAA was established in 1998 to support authors and publishers who live in or write about the U.P. UPPAA is a Michigan nonprofit association with more than 100 members, many of whose books are featured on the organization’s website at www.uppaa.org. UPPAA welcomes membership and participation from anyone with a U..P connection who is interested in writing.

Christie Mastric can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 250. Her email address is cbleck@miningjournal.net.

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