Danielle Sosin used to live down the hall from me, so I always meant to read this book. In 2013, it was chosen as the "One Book South Dakota" and I STILL didn't get on the bandwagon, but I finally got around to it two years late.

The book follows three stories taking place in three different time periods on Lake Superior: a Native American story in the 1600s, a pioneer story in the 1800s, and a modern (year 2000) story. Sosin pays a great deal of attention to the quiet moments in life and the writing is often beautiful. The book strikes a good balance between the three stories so that it is never too jarring to move from one to the next. I "enjoyed" the modern story most because it required the least work -- I had lived in the area around that time, and my best friend and I did a "circle tour" around the Great Lakes very similar to the one Nora takes. But I think the pioneer story was the one that will most stick with me, as it was incredibly haunting and I just kept hoping it would end differently than it did.

My biggest gripe about this book was its ending -- or lack thereof. I'm used to literary fiction being fairly open-ended and I'm more comfortable with ambiguous endings than most people are (probably because I'm guilty of writing them.) But I just felt that these three stories were TOO unresolved, especially the Native American storyline. I also wondered whether someone who did not have a personal connection with Lake Superior would find this book as evocative as a "local" -- although the descriptions are so vivid that a reader could probably finish feeling as she had lived there, too.

Man, I miss Duluth.

More fun than scary!

Now just $.99 in Kindle edition.

Shadow Island: A Spooky Tale of Lake Superior.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00FL18DTS

The humorous adventures of three girls – 12-year-old Amanda, her kid sister Sally, and her best friend Roxanne – who find themselves trapped on Shadow Island, a spooky island near a sleepy resort somewhere on Lake Superior. To have any chance to get away, the girls will have to explore the mysterious and long-abandoned Stardust Hotel. . . . with its many rooms, towers, and dusty cellar. Turns out it's not quite as deserted as everyone thought!

In Raymond Bial’s ghost stories for kids, the characters encounter lots of ghosts as they dash from one funny spooky encounter to the next.

In the process, they learn a lot about themselves – and about the importance of friends, family, and doing the right thing.

Raymond Bial's humorous spooky tales, set in the Midwest and full of regional heritage and history, are fun to read, not too scary for young readers, and always deliver good lessons on friendship and a bit of regional history.

Raymond Bial is the author of more than 100 books for children and adults, including Amish Home, The Underground Railroad, Where Lincoln Walked, Ellis Island, and others. His other books of humorous ghost stories for kids include The Fresh Grave (short stories), The Ghost of Honeymoon Creek (a novel), and Dripping Blood Cave (short stories). He lives in Urbana, Illinois.