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Overview
When Madeline Stone walks away from Chicago and moves five hundred miles north to the coast of Lake Superior, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she isn't prepared for how much her life will change.
Charged with caring for an aging family friend, Madeline finds herself in the middle of beautiful nowhere with Gladys and Arbutus, two octogenarian sisters-one sharp and stubborn, the other sweeter than sunshine. As Madeline begins to experience the ways of the small, tight-knit town, she is drawn into the lives and dramas of its residents. It's a place where times are tough and debts run deep, but friendship, community, and compassion run deeper. As the story hurtles along-featuring a lost child, a dashed love, a car accident, a wedding, a fire, and a romantic reunion-Gladys, Arbutus, and the rest of the town teach Madeline more about life, love, and goodwill than she's learned in a lifetime.
A heartwarming novel, South of Superior explores the deep reward in caring for others, and shows how one who is poor in pocket can be rich in so many other ways, and how little it often takes to make someone happy.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781101535233 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2011 |
| Sold by: | Penguin Group |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 384 |
| Sales rank: | 272,949 |
| File size: | 365 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Prologue
The letter from Gladys Hansen was written in blue ink in an angular hand, on one sheet of plain white paper.
Dear Madeline Stone, it began,
I have thought to write to you for quite some while. I didn’t because I supposed you wouldn’t appreciate it, that you’d think it wasn’t my place. I should have gone ahead and written anyhow.
I was sorry to hear of Emmy’s passing. I know she was your mother, much more than Jackie Stone ever could’ve been. It is a hard loss, of someone so close. I expect you are at sea still without her—a year is not really long in the scheme of things. I won’t say it was for the best or any of that. It can never feel right to lose someone so dear.
Emmy wrote me now and then, I don’t know if you knew. She told me about the cancer, and how you helped her. She always said she wanted there to be some link for you up north, a door open if you wanted it. I should have done better with that.
I am writing now because I need help. My sister, Arbutus, has taken a bad turn. She’s crippled up with the arthritis and since she fell this last time she can hardly get around at all. We are here in Chicago where you are, staying with my nephew Nathan. Moving in with him seemed like the only thing to do, but it is no good. Butte has hardly stirred from her chair since we got here, she says it is too much trouble. This isn’t home and if we don’t get home I swear she will be dead before many more months are gone.
What I need is someone to come back up north with us, someone to live in, to lift and bathe her and so forth, someone young and strong to help with whatever is needed. At least for a while. I hope you won’t take this amiss but I know that you know how to do this. I thought you might come and help us. And I thought that maybe you should see where your people came from. Maybe it’s time.
I would pay a small wage, not much I’m afraid, but there would be your room and board included. There is nothing much to buy up home, so if you had a mind to you could live cheap. Let me know your answer soon. If you say no I will have to think of something else. Nathan seems restless now at having us here and I am afraid he will put Arbutus in a home. I cannot stand to think of that. Please do come.
Yours truly,
Gladys Hansen
Madeline had opened the letter as she came in the door from work, and now she stood in the entryway, still wearing her pink waitress dress that smelled faintly of fryer grease, gazing at it in astonishment. This from the woman who had been her grandfather’s—what? Lady-friend? Paramour? Lover?—the estranged grandfather who’d abandoned Madeline to her fate more than thirty years ago. She’d only been three years old. Cards had come like clockwork on her birthday and at Christmas, always with a five-dollar bill taped inside, written in this same hand: Best Wishes from Joe Stone and Gladys Hansen, the return address a post office box in McAllaster, Michigan. Those cards—answered only by a perfunctory thank you and then only because Emmy insisted—had been the sum total of her relationship with her grandfather.
Emmy had explained it all when Madeline was very small. Gladys was a good friend of Joe Stone’s, and ladies often did do things like that, of the two in a couple—sent the cards, remembered the birthdays. Emmy explained also that Madeline’s grandfather was just too old and set in his ways to look after a little girl, which was why the two of them were so lucky, to be able to live together in Chicago. The lucky part was true, but the part about Madeline’s grandfather was a polite fiction, and she wasn’t very old at all when she understood that.
What her grandfather was in reality was a heartless, irresponsible bastard. Of course someone as kindhearted as Emmy would never have said anything so blunt, not to a child. Not even to an adult. They’d disagreed about it when Madeline got old enough— Emmy counseling Madeline to be forgiving, not to harbor such bitterness, Madeline telling Emmy in the sharp way of the young not to be naïve and soft. Eventually—well, after Emmy got so sick— they’d agreed to disagree and left the topic where it belonged, tucked away, not worth discussing. It was only at the end that Emmybrought it up again. Promise me you’ll try to forgive the man, she’d said. For your own sake. Madeline had promised, not meaning it really, just wanting the worried look to leave Emmy’s eyes, but in the end her insincerity didn’t matter. She’d given her word to the person she loved most on earth, and against her will she began to feel obliged to live up to it. At least to make some stab at living up to it.
Those five-dollar bills Gladys Hansen sent stopped when Madeline turned twenty-one (to her relief—both the cards and money had made her uncomfortable; she still had them all, tucked into a box somewhere, the money unspent), but the cards kept coming, two a year, even after Joe Stone died. Nowadays they were just signed, with no message: Gladys Hansen.
And now this. It took a lot of nerve to ask. The idea was preposterous.
Madeline crumpled the letter into a ball and hurled it toward the wastebasket, but of course something so insubstantial—one frail piece of paper—couldn’t carry off the gesture. It drifted to the floor a few feet short of its mark. Madeline left it there.
An hour later she was back in the entryway, frowning into the mirror, tugging at her slip. Richard—her boyfriend of three years and fiancé of six months—had said to dress up, they were going someplace fancy, and she had, but she resented the effort. It was a raw night, and she was not in the mood for strappy high heels and the skimpy, clingy red dress Richard had surprised her with on Valentine’s Day. She sighed. The dress was ridiculous. She didn’t have the figure for it, aside from her bosom, which was undoubtedly what he was thinking of when he chose it. She was a sturdy person, not very tall, top heavy, all-over muscular from her years of waiting table. A serviceable person, she thought, standing there in front of the wavy-glassed mirror.
Brown eyes stared back at her bleakly. A serviceable, capable person with a heart like a volcano, one that was spewing out a lava of rage and confusion and grief. Oh, no one would ever guess it. Her customers would never believe her capable of such fury and desolation, the unending baffled confusion she felt as to how to go on living without Emmy. She was like an animal who’d been blinded and N maimed, clawing and flailing in a cage. She hid this well, she knew. She was ever the sensible and steady one, the cheerful, dependable one, the one who made everyone laugh but always kept their orders straight. But beneath the surface, down in the tunnels of the real Madeline, a train wreck had happened. Madeline felt from moment to moment that there was no telling what she might do.
Her gaze caught the crumpled letter from Gladys Hansen. She stared it down for a moment. Let it lie there, damn it. But she couldn’t. It was untidy, for one thing. Also it looked helpless. Helpless and reproachful. Madeline bent and picked the letter up, smoothed it out, propped it against the small lamp on the library table next to the door. Then she reached for the old navy peacoat she’d had since the fall she almost went to college—one thing she would not do was be cold all evening—and the doorbell rang and she buzzed Richard in.
What People are Saying About This
“A story that is peculiarly American, brimming with lessons about compassion and community. South of Superior is not to be forgotten.”--(Connie May Fowler, author of Before Women Had Wings)
“An unsentimental but warm-hearted view of life in an isolated Michigan town. Reminiscent of Richard Russo, South of Superior is an engaging tale told with wit and charm.”--(Philip Caputo)
“South of Superior is a charming story where hardships forge character, friendships endure for decades, and love unfolds in unusual ways. Most of all it is a celebration of the ever-surprising strengths of the human spirit.”--(Beth Hoffman, New York Times–bestselling author of Saving CeeCee Honeycutt)
“"I was captivated by Ms. Airgood’s setting and her characters, they’re pitch pefect. South of Superior is a wonderful debut novel. I couldn’t get the story out of my mind even weeks after I put it down. It was that haunting, that heartfelt. Brava!”--(Lesley Kagan, author of Whistling in the Dark)
“A heartfelt ode to the simpler things in life. You’ll be delighted and embraced by the strong willed characters and the small town setting and when you’re finished you’ll want to go embrace the people in your own circle.”--(Tiffany Baker, author of The Little Giant of Aberdeen County)
Reading Group Guide
INTRODUCTION
When Madeline Stone walks away from her Chicago life and moves five hundred miles north to the coast of Lake Superior, in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, she isn't prepared for how much her life will change. Charged with caring for an aging family friend,
Madeline finds herself in the middle of beautiful nowhere with Gladys and Artubus, two octogenarian sisters—one sharp and stubborn, the other sweeter than sunshine. As she is drawn into the dramas of the small, tight-knit town, Madeline learns that it's a place where times are tough and debts run deep, but where friendship, community, and compassion run deeper.
A debut novel full of heart, South of Superior shows that there is a deep reward in caring for others, that one who is poor in pocket can be rich in so many other ways, and that happiness often comes from the smallest gestures.
ABOUT ELLEN AIRGOOD
Ellen Airgood runs a diner in Grand Marais, Michigan. This is her first novel.
AN ESSAY FROM ELLEN AIRGOOD
From Waitress To Writer
I grew up on a small farm, the youngest of four children. My father was a blacksmith and a schoolteacher. For the last nineteen years I've been a waitress in Grand Marais, Michigan. I was twenty-five when I came to this tiny, Lake Superior town, on a camping trip with my sister, and fell in love with the man who made my cheese sandwich and chocolate malt at the local diner. We met, exchanged assessing, almost challenging gazes, and six months later we got married. I told my sister we would, on the way back to our campsite that first day. "You're crazy," she said worriedly. But pretty soon she grinned, shook her head, started getting into the spirit of it. "Well," she said. "This is going to be interesting." And it has been.
I've never been sorry. My husband Rick and I run a diner together, a job which is always consuming, often punishing, and hugely fulfilling. Most of what I know about maturity and compassion, not to mention story, I've learned from waiting tables. We work eighty to a hundred hours a week together almost year around, and one way or another we've faced the constant barrage of setbacks and frustrations and equipment failures that restaurant work is, the high stress and long hours. There is so much satisfaction in it, though: the goodness of hard work, the joy of feeding people a meal they love, the delight of long friendships, the pride in a job well done. All kinds of people come here from all kinds of places, and we get to meet them, to hear their stories, and pretty often we get to make them happy for the time that they are here.
This is the route I took to becoming a writer. I didn't get an MFA or study writing in school. I could have learned about life anywhere, but fate brought me here, to the end of the earth and a tiny town that time forgot. My customers have given me good practice as a storyteller, too. It's a matter of survival. If I can entertain people, draw them over to my side, they won't murder me when I'm the only waitress of the floor and the cook is swamped and the wait is long and we're out of silverware and I didn't know the fish was gone when I took their order.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
- Gladys always tells Madeline how much of an outsider she is, how much she doesn't understand the ways of McAllester. By the end of the novel do you think Madeline is a part of the town? In what ways has she let the community of McAllester transform her? In what way has she transformed the community?
- Throughout the novel, Madeline is looking for a sense of purpose, for something to guide her life. At the end of the novel, do you think she's found that sense of purpose? What do you think it is? How is it different from what she was expecting when she first came to McAllester?
- Change is a major theme of the novel, and yet so much of what both Gladys and Madeline love about McAllester is how the town follows an older way of living. What kind of changes happen in the novel? Which character do you think is the most changed by the end?
- While Madeline and Gladys are deeply stubborn people, Arbutus is more likely to be adaptable. Do you think this makes Arbutus any less strong than the other women? In what ways is she just as stubborn? What do you think Madeline learns from Arbutus's way of getting her own way?
- Think about the Bensons. Do you think that they are wrong to want to improve their business? What could they have done to be more in keeping with the community? What does Madeline learn that they do not?
- Values are important to all the characters in the novel. How are Madeline's values different from Gladys's? Paul's? What do you think Randi's values are? The Bensons? Think about yourself. Which character do you feel most similar to?
- At the start of the novel, Madeline takes an immediate dislike to Randi while Gladys has more patience for her. What do you think Gladys sees that Madeline does not? Think about how Madeline and Randi's relationship changes. How do you think Madeline's increased knowledge both about herself and about her history changes how she feels about Randi?
- We never get to meet Joe Stone or learn why he gave Madeline away. What do you think his motivations were? Do you think he made the right choice? How did his giving Madeline away make her more like the Stones?
- Life in McAllester is hard. Why do you think Madeline ultimately chooses it over returning to Chicago? What virtues do you see in it? What qualities would you want to emulate in your own life?
- The novel ends on a note of anticipation. What do you think will happen to the characters after the book has ended? How do you think what Madeline has learned will help her handle future hardships?
