The resort town of Weneshkeen, nestled along Michigan’s Gold Coast, has become a complex melting pot: townies and old timers mix with ritzy summer folk, migrant cherry pickers, wily river guides, and a few Ojibwe Indians. As the summer blooms, these lives mingle in surprising ways–a lifelong resident and Vietnam Vet pursues the take-no-guff deputy sheriff, while plotting revenge against the jet-skiers polluting his beloved lake; a summer kid from downstate stumbles into a romance with the sexiest rich girl in town; the town’s retired reverend discovers the Internet and a new friend in his computer tutor. A resonant social comedy with richly-drawn characters and quirky charm, The Lake, the River & the Other Lake welcomes you into a world that you may never want to leave.

From the Trade Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The town of Weneshkeen, Mich., on Lake Michigan's Gold Coast, may be little, but a heck of a lot goes on there. This smart, punchy first novel is a smalltown soap opera, burning and churning through the summer of 2001. Amick develops a group of disparate characters, each one with a dilemma to solve or an axe to grind, and then passes the story line from one to the next in a game of literary tag. The novel's primary force is Roger Drinkwater, a no-nonsense Ojibwe Indian who served in Vietnam and coaches the local high school swim team. The calm of his peaceful lakeside home has been shattered by screeching jet skis driven by obnoxious young Fudgies (slang for tourists), and he vows to use his military training to try and silence the mechanized nuisance. Amick peppers his plot with other vexed individuals, including a recently retired minister grappling with an Internet porn addiction and a bigoted orchard owner whose son and daughter betray him by choosing foreign mates. At the start, the novel feels a bit quaint, but it quickly develops a sharp edge. Bitterly comic and surprisingly meaty, this roiling tale of passion, anger, regret and lust is dark fun for the Garrison Keillor demographic. 7-city author tour. (May)
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From School Library Journal

Adult/High School–Weneshkeen, MI, a small town on a small lake, appears simple and quiet on the surface. But Amick peels back the picture-postcard serenity with a set of loosely connected stories that are often funny and always touching. Most are based on the conflict between the year-round residents and the summer people (called fudgies because of the quantities of the candy they buy at the various shops). Roger Drinkwater is an Ojibwe who served in Vietnam and now coaches the high school swim team. Tired of the noisy jet skis that make his daily swim difficult and dangerous, he enters a one-man crusade to sabotage them. Other stories include a farmer whose son marries a migrant worker and has to face his own feelings of racism, a teen fudgie who begins dating the summer beauty queen and finds that she may be more trouble then she's worth, and a businessman who starts a rumor that David Letterman is vacationing in the town to help sell his idea of Sumac Lemonade. The narrative is driven by the strength of the well-rounded, memorable, and likable characters. The down-home humor will remind readers of Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon tales (Viking), but Amick moves beyond the puns here and there to show the influence of T. C. Boyle. Darkly funny and bitterly poignant, this first novel is a great read for fans of quirky, well-wrought fiction.–Matthew L. Moffett, Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale
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