The Keweenaw Trilogy
Keweenaw Grace
Called to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to build a youth mission, Johnny Hendricks instead finds himself at the center of a controversy that brings decades-old tensions in Hancock to the surface. Armed with little more than faith and determination, Johnny faces a divided town, an angry black bear, a kidnapping, a prison break, and a Phannakuchha in Keweenaw Grace.
Keweenaw Hope
As Johnny Hendricks works to build his youth mission in historic Hancock, an unlikely group joins him, each bringing their own talents, secrets, and pasts. Against the rugged beauty of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula, they must navigate unexpected challenges as they work together to turn Johnny’s vision into reality.
Keweenaw Faith
After a devastating accident leaves him in a wheelchair and struggling with his faith, Johnny Hendricks must find a new purpose when a quiet voice leads him toward a vision only he can fulfill. With a figure from the past and a mysterious Yooper on the run standing in his way, Johnny faces an uphill journey of faith, healing, and unexpected challenges.
Reader Reviews
See what readers say about Brian's series.
A masterful trilogy set in the rugged beauty of Northern Michigan. Keweenaw Grace and its sequels offer true inspiration, character depth, and rich hope.
Eleanor R.
The Keweenaw Peninsula, “incomparable when the air was brisk,” writes Brian Holmes, protrudes appendix-like some 125 miles into the waters of Lake Superior—the northwest-most territory of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula: Bumbletown, Copper Falls, Old Victoria, Misery Bay.
The natural beauty of much of it competes with its exotic mixture of its peoples. Native Americans, African-Americans, and from northern Europe a settlement of Finns to complement the work-a-day whites. Copper mining people. Men and women in search for something ineffable—something spiritual. Something they must find. Brian Holmes does setting well, that sense of place that all good stories must have for the reader to lose him or herself in the story—to enter the story populated by so many characters you soon come to like.
Keweenaw Hope is populated with some people you think you might know and with the many you would like to— from the Hancock city dwellers to the outliers to the extreme north. And for those readers who read and loved Holmes's Keweenaw Grace, not a few of them are back, the foremost being Johnny Hendricks—a man with a mission to build just that, a proper youth mission and to bring in the people to run it. Characters we care about make any book a winner, and Holmes knows where and how to find them. Northern Ireland, Kentucky, native UP people, of course, and a few more old souls for balance.
The author is himself a musician, so he writes from what he knows well, in one memorable scene bringing to bear a winsome fiddler, a Gospel Blues banjo-picker, and of course some powerful vocals to delight one church congregation, all “transformed into something extra special.” Indeed. And that is what this novel offers. Something needed. Something special.
Keweenaw Hope is a delightful and uplifting book. Smartly written —an affirmation of all that makes even the most reluctant of us embrace faith, grace, and always hope.
A. McMaster