There is a road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that most people will never drive. It cuts through dense pine forest, past crumbling rock piles left over from a copper mine that closed decades ago, and ends at a cemetery where the names on the headstones are still legible if you know where to look. Some maps call it Riippa Road. It never needed an official name. For one family, it was simply the way home.

That road is the spine of Shirley J. Williams’s The Road to Winona, a novel built from her own family’s history. It is not a story about famous people or major historical turning points. It is a story about what it cost ordinary Finnish immigrants to build a life in America, and what they left behind for the people who came after them.

A Country Worth Leaving

The novel opens not with a ship or a dock, but with the land itself. Williams traces Finland back nearly two billion years, through glaciers and granite, before settling into the late 1800s, when the country existed as a Grand Duchy under the Russian Empire. It was a place of short, brilliant summers and long winters lit by the aurora, of saunas and rye bread and sisu, the Finnish word for the kind of stubborn endurance that has no clean English translation.

It was also a place running out of options. Russification policies were squeezing Finnish language and self-governance. Conscription loomed over young men. Crop failures and recurring famine left families foraging for roots and bark just to survive a winter. Against this backdrop, two young men named Daniel and Benjamin make the decision that sets the entire saga in motion: they leave.

Two Journeys, One Promise

Daniel’s path takes him through the worst of industrial-era labor exploitation. He survives a debt-bondage logging camp in Michigan, where wages vanish into rigged company fees and workers who try to escape are hunted down. He survives a mill where neglected machinery finally gives way, killing a friend in front of him. He survives a mine collapse at Quincy Mine that nearly buries him alive. Through all of it, he is saving every coin toward a single promise made to a girl named Emilia back in Finland: that he would send for her.

He keeps that promise after eleven years. Emilia crosses the ocean, and the two finally marry beneath a birch tree behind the home he built for her. Their happiness lasts three months. She dies of consumption that same year, and Daniel buries her beneath the pines on land they had only just begun to call theirs.

It is grief, not ambition, that brings the next great figure of the book into the story.

Marija: The Woman Who Held It Together

Daniel’s younger sister, Marija, crosses the Atlantic alone to stand beside her brother in his loss. She arrives intending to offer comfort for a season. She ends up staying for the rest of her life, and the back half of the novel essentially belongs to her.

Marija marries Joel Riippa in a wedding that blends old Finnish sauna ritual with a later church ceremony. Together they homestead 160 acres near Winona, build a sawmill from salvaged scrap iron, and start a family that will eventually number ten children. When Joel is crippled in a mining collapse, Marija takes over running the boarding house, the mill’s books, and the household, without ever describing herself as anything other than a woman doing what needed doing.

She raises sons who go off to fight in World War II, including one decorated for heroism after pulling a burning, live-ammunition trailer away from a French town. She organizes Finnish Relief collections during the Winter War, when letters arrive from cousins in Karelia describing villages burned rather than surrendered to Soviet troops. In old age, after losing a leg to a diabetes-related infection, she carves her own wooden prosthetic rather than accept the clinical replacement offered to her, and keeps walking her land on it.

By the time she dies at eighty-six, the woman who arrived in America with little more than a satchel and a sense of duty has become, in the words of one mourner at her funeral, the thread holding generations together.

A Second Family, Quietly Converging

Running parallel to Daniel and Marija’s story is Benjamin Keranen, a Finnish farmer who walks hundreds of miles across his own country just to reach a port, then settles his family in Wisconsin’s lumber camps rather than Michigan’s mines. For most of the book, his story seems separate from Daniel and Marija’s, two immigrant families pursuing the same dream along different roads.

Williams lets that distance close slowly, and the reveal is one of the novel’s quieter triumphs. Benjamin’s grandson, Lloyd Peterson, turns out to be the man who will become the narrator’s father. Decades after Daniel and Benjamin traveled to America together as young men, their descendants meet again, first by accident on a train platform of young soldiers shipping out to World War II, and later when Marija, now an old woman, sits down with Lloyd’s grandparents and recognizes a name and a face in a box of old photographs.

It is a structural choice that turns the novel from a single family chronicle into something closer to a tapestry, two threads woven from the same Finnish cloth, pulled apart by an ocean, and tied back together a generation later in the same small Michigan town.

Why This Story Still Matters

What makes The Road to Winona resonate beyond genealogy is how unflinching it is about the cost of that American dream. Williams does not soften the company-town debt traps, the unsafe mills, or the casual prejudice immigrants like Daniel and Benjamin faced. She does not skip the grief, the failed second marriage, the children buried young, or the quiet erosion of a woman’s body after a lifetime of physical labor.

And yet the dominant note of the book is not despair. It is sisu. It is the lavender Daniel plants over Emilia’s grave every spring. It is Marija refusing to call an ambulance until she has finished telling her son she was fixing the roof, not falling off it. It is a family that keeps choosing to stay rooted in a town the mining company abandoned, simply because that ground holds everyone who came before them.

The Road to Winona is not a metaphor in this book. It is an actual gravel road in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and Shirley Williams is the descendant who still walks it. Her novel is what happens when a family’s oral history gets the patient, careful treatment it deserves: not just preserved, but brought back to life.