The North American Great Lakes, sometimes called inland seas, are the world’s largest freshwater system. They seem as immense and ancient as any ocean, but Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, as we know them today, are younger than Stonehenge. For generations, people watched them form and adapted as the landscape changed again and again.
Between the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago and about 3,000 years ago, the entire Great Lakes region experienced dramatic shifts in environment, climate, and elevation. Glaciers that covered it retreated in fits and starts, and paleolakes formed and disappeared again, leaving behind boggy tundra. The bedrock itself rose and fell like a very large trampoline. Through it all, humans moved across the landscape, hunting, foraging, and even trading along networks spanning thousands of miles.
If the restaurant's claims are to be believed, it's here that King Henry III picked up a fork for the first time and popularised its use in France.
Every December day that I’m in Maine I swim in the ocean and my husband tells me I’m insane. The temperature keeps dropping. I get two respiratory infections, a twenty-four-hour stomach thing. Why? he says to me. Mom, the children say. They have only recently transitioned me to Mom from Mommy, and every time they say it my breath catches. Their dad’s Cuban and I’ve tried to convince them to transition me to Mami. It’s Spanish! I say. You’re white, Mom, they say. You know, Mom, our younger kid says, beating yourself up isn’t a hobby. I’m preparing, I tell them. For what? they say. For January.
Chan’s chronicles of atrocities against Malayan children serve as a bracing reminder that despite the way World War II is often depicted in fiction, it was not romantic. “The Storm We Made” invites reflection about who should be considered the main characters of this war. It’s clear that people in every locale affected by its brutalities deserve to be protagonists, and Chan’s novel proves there are still fresh perspectives to reveal.
Celebrating true love but also acknowledging the dark forces that haunt refugee and immigrant lives in transition, this YA graphic novel attains epic dimensions in capturing the complex, bittersweet journeys of its fully-realized characters.