Two very different debut novels are today’s offerings. One is the story of women strikers in Detroit in the 1930s, the other a searing look at what bipolar disorder does to a woman’s life.

(Courtesy of the author.)

“Not Yet Lost”: by Janis M. Falk (She Writes Press, $17.99)

If you want an interesting history of people’s struggles in the early days of the labor movement, this novel by a resident of Door County, Wis., will teach you.

In a Polish community in Detroit in 1937, Florence and her fierce friend Basia hand-roll cigars for very low wages, care for children and try to be home to make supper. Detroit, home of U.S. auto manufacturing, is in the throes of labor organizing. The city is showing the first signs of coming out of the Great Depression, as people begin to buy cars. But the industry, and small businesses such as the cigar factory, run on low wages, long hours and unsafe, unsanitary working conditions. Poor immigrants who came to America for a better life are standing up for their rights as they band together in the American Federation of Labor (AFL), United Auto Workers (UAW) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

One day the cigar factory manager pushes Basia too far in giving orders and a strike begins. The women take their tactics from men in the auto factories who have been striking, as well as women in other cigar workplaces. But Florence’s husband, Alex, is against this defiance, even more so when he unwittingly joins the Black Legion, whose members hate these Eastern Europeans and will do everything to keep them from thriving. (Florence and Alex are based on the author’s grandparents.)

Falk, a Detroit native, writes vividly about Florence and Basia’s strike, when they lock themselves in the cigar factory with other women. They are tired and worried about their children, but determined, even when police turn fire hoses blasting icy water on them. Women in the tight-knit Polish community who are not striking bring food and other supplies and see that kids and husbands of strikers are fed. And when Florence experiences a devastating death, she picks up the mantle of leadership and rallies her fellow strikers.

Readers are introduced to real-life early labor organizers such as Mary Zuk and Stanley and Margaret Nowak, as well as artist Diego Rivera, whose Detroit Industry Murals depict everything the author says she loves about the city, including innovation, hard work and the working class. This famous artwork, named a National Historic Landmark, can be seen at the Detroit Institute of Arts.

There is so much energy in Falk’s writing that the reader can feel tensions in the city as officials, some working secretly with the bosses, try to stop the cigar factory women from organizing, call them Communists and demean them for being Polish. She seamlessly weaves in women’s domestic duties, family life and the dishes they cook that people ate in the Old Country.

Don’t miss this important read, published by a small press.

Teaser quote: ” ‘Have you heard the news? It’s not just factories anymore! Shop girls are on strike. Women took over Woolworth’s drugstore. The downtown location. Even some customers refused to leave in order to support the workers…And shoe stores and hotels. The world’s with us ladies. It’s our time now.’ ”

(Courtesy of Coffee House Press)

“The Mind Reels”: by Fredrick deBoer (Coffee House Press, $28)

We take a horrifying trip through the mind of a bipolar woman in this novel from a Connecticut-based author who is himself bipolar, published by a Minneapolis-based press.

Alice is an ordinary young woman whose first mental break happens when she is a college freshman living in a dorm room where “she will go insane.” She’s so hyper her patient roommate moves out because she can’t stand Alice’s all-night talking. Alice is paranoid, thinking her roommate is rearranging her shower supplies and that someone might be poisoning her food. She can’t concentrate and only wants to sleep unless her brain is firing and then she runs, barefoot, across campus in terror. There are more hospitalizations and indifferent doctors who pile on more meds.

Years pass and Alice is 36, overweight from post-hospitalization meds that cause her difficulties the author explains at length. She’s done with indifferent sex with boys whom she wants to please, doing whatever they ask her to do. She has a minimal job, exactly what she’s looking for, so she doesn’t have to interact with other people. She’s mentally stable but indifferent to life too. Pills even out her emotions but her brain is joyless. She sees nothing in her future.

In the end (not a spoiler), Alice is sitting on her old couch facing two bottles of pills. One holds her prescription medication; the other is filled with a cocktail of pills that will kill her. Which does she take? The author doesn’t tell us. Some readers will be happy to imagine Alice chooses life. Others might feel the author cheats here, leaving it up to the reader to decide. But this is deBoer’s story. It seems only fair that after accompanying Alice on her long, cruel bipolar journey we should learn her fate.

DeBoer’s non-fiction books are “The Cult of Smart” and “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.” His writing has been published in national newspapers and magazines.

Teaser quote: “In her brain, though, her synapses fired with an alien and mechanistic kind of purpose; there was no chaos, only an immensely misguided order. Some deep bestial neurological structures fired inappropriately and stoked within her an instinct of brute survival. The fragile skeleton of her ego threatened to snap under the pressure of the animal forces that pressed down on her consciousness, her narrative mind sagging and distended beneath pitiless and grandiose feeling. She must run. She must run. She must run.”

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