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At The Wake is an unflinching exploration of family, legacy, and the long shadow cast by one man's life. Achiel Van Slyck was a man of contradictions-a war hero who took pride in his service, but also a vindictive neighbor, a volatile father, and a man whose actions shattered lives, including his own. When he murdered Clifford Ellis in 1975, the crime sent shockwaves through his family and community, leaving scars and secrets that would ripple across generations.

Through a kaleidoscope of perspectives-his wife, children, siblings, and even his victims-Achiel's story unfolds in fragments, revealing a complex portrait of a man shaped by trauma, war, and a simmering rage. As each family member recounts their experiences, they grapple with the truths of their shared past, the weight of Achiel's legacy, and their own struggles to reconcile love, anger, and loss.

Set against the backdrop of small-town dynamics and spanning decades, At The Wake delves into the messy, often painful process of confronting one's history. It's a tale of resilience, reflection, and the ways in which families try to move forward while bearing the imprint of the past. Michael David MacBride weaves a haunting and evocative narrative that challenges readers to ask: can we ever truly escape the shadows of our ancestors?

<adult, contemporary bookclub fiction>

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Maude and Vern have been a duck couple for a long time. They've had ducklings and dealt with the trauma and grief of losing them. On the surface, now they're struggling with fertility, but those issues cover up past trauma and grief. Maude and Vern offer a humorous look at the complications of relationships and the struggles with deciding to become a parent, parenting, and what happens if you can't become a parent.

Written in children's book style, Who Gives a Duck? is anything but. Humor, grace, and cussing get this ducking couple the help they need to deal with the grief and trauma of infertility and relationship issues.

<adult, picture book>

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Bookclub questions [coming soon]

In 2010, Jenna McGuire, Michael Posada, and Kathy Armstrong are thirty-somethings who developed a service called The Love Formula in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The Love Formula achieved one of the rarest things possible: no user complaints. The media took that to mean it had a “100% success rate,” but the team winced whenever it was pitched that way, fearing backlash. They were just glad they were helping people find happiness and being able to work with their best friends. Each of the friends uses the service to find their own matches and comes to terms with the technology in different ways. Jenna, who becomes the face of The Love Formula, struggles because she's approaching her 100th date without finding a perfect match. She balances feeling like a fraud selling a service that doesn't work for her, while also trying to find a happy relationship. 

The Love Formula is written in a tongue and cheek style that embraces the romantic comedies it references and is influenced by.

<adult, contemporary bookclub fiction>

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Ann Arbor, MI. 1990. Louie is drowning his sorrows in crappy retail jobs while trying to avoid the inevitable transition into pending adulthood. Through a mix of luck, rebellion, and boredom, he makes new friends who form a ska band, SKAborough Fair, to pass the time. Louie, Denis, Ruby, Harry, and Rudie have an undeniable chemistry on stage and generate a genuine hit song that charts but earns them the label of "one-hit wonder." As they try to shake that label, tour the world, and find themselves, they stumble through the pains of navigating young adulthood and adjusting to the stress of creating new music. Eventually, tensions between some band members threaten to break the band apart as the other members try to keep the peace and produce new music, hoping to find unity in the one thing that brought them together.

Listen to their one big hit, "Rudy Don't Fail" here!

<adult, contemporary bookclub fiction>

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In Opole, Michigan, they celebrate their Polish heritage by baking paczkis and hosting an annual Wianki festival. Esther Fuhrman is a small-town gossip in Opole who slips in and out of everyone’s lives. She spreads their stories, adding her own details when necessary to fill the gaps or make the stories more interesting. Whether it’s the pornography being distributed on the playground, the sale of firearms on the school bus, or a cheese shoppe that might be a front for the mob, Esther has her nose in it all. Sometimes she uncovers a truth and averts a disaster, and other times she’s simply wrong. When the neighbors lose faith in her as a reliable source for news and close their doors to Esther, she struggles to establish a new identity and purpose.

<adult, contemporary bookclub fiction>

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On Earth, Grover Baines (a NASA scientist) is murdered in 1979 when he stumbles upon a secret third Voyager flight. Unlike the two other probes, Voyager 3 was a small manned craft loaded with reproductive material in hopes of finding a suitable planet for habitation on Alpha Centauri. The scientist's family continues to unravel clues about what happened, and whether there's any truth to the papers they discover. Years later, in 2001, a fourth Voyager is sent on the same mission. Though technology has advanced dramatically in the 24 years since the first three Voyagers were launched, this mission manages to remain secret amid the attacks on the Twin Towers. When contact is lost with Voyager 4, plans are put into motion for a 5th Voyager to retrieve its lost siblings. As NASA struggles to reconcile the past, the crews on each ship wrestle with the boredom of space and limitations of the technology available to them, and the Baines family attempts to find peace with the past. 

<adult, literary, science fiction>

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Jenny is an orphan caught in the middle of a bidding war between two clerks with ties to wealthy philanthropists, who find ways to manipulate the system through insider trading. The Market allows shares of children to be traded, where more investment provides a better opportunity for the child's future. However, you can also short a child's stock and bet on him or her failing. Because orphans are unknown commodities, they offer great risk and potential reward for savvy investors, but leave the orphans to the whims of the Market.

<adult, literary, speculative fiction>

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The eleven collected stories represent work beginning at as early as 1997 and as recent as 2018. It’s certainly not all inclusive of the work done during that period, but these stories share elements and themes in common. Though the stories span so many years, they share a general sense of humor, exploration of quasi-sci-fi/speculative fiction, and relationships echo through the sentences.

<adult, humor, sci-fi, speculative fiction>