 party bus daytrip. Forget frozen yogurt. This is frozen CUSTARD. The real deal. When spring and summer are in full swing, expect to stand in line for a long while for these delicious treats. We recommend the half and half dipped in your choice of sprinkles, and the frozen chocolate bananas are also absolutely not to be missed. Bob Jo's blows every other ice cream place out of the water. They opened in 1947 and they show no signs of slowing down. Located on Fort Street halfway between Eureka and Pennsylvania Road.
Bars
peed Boat Bar & Grill - This is a Wyandotte essential, and you can't miss it with the authentic speed boat sticking out of the roof! If you love dive bars with great burgers, you'll love this place. Located on the water with outdoor seating. Everyone we know goes here for the burgers, but they've also got excellent chili so be sure to check that out. Great fish fry, and kararoke on the weekends! Located on Biddle Avenue between Goddard and Emmons.
Oak Cafe - Anybody who lives Downriver and loves a great bar atmosphere is familiar with Oak Cafe in Wyandotte. Their beer selection is truly incredible, with about two hundred and fifty beers available. This is a wonderful place to catch the big game, have some delicious bar food, and hang out with your friends. The staff is always friendly, and you can't beat the vibe here. Don't miss their Tex Mex selections like mini tacos and mini burritos, and of course the delicious Mucho Nacho Supreme. Located the corner of Oak Street and 12th.
Chas Bar - Chas Bar is known as the place for the best burgers in town and the most friendly atmosphere. It's just a small and casual bar with a great menu and drink selection. Lots of video games and a pool table too. This bar has a generally older crowd since it's so rich with Wyandotte history and memories. Very laid back and comfortable. Located on Ford Avenue just past the railroad tracks.
My Place Bar & Grill - Formerly Barney's Bar, My Place Bar & Grill is still just as great as it always was. They've got that same old familiar atmosphere that you love, plus new touches like a pool table and trivia to keep you entertained. Nosh on delicious bar food (we love the super nachos which are more than enough for two!) while sipping on cheap daily specials that go light on your wallet. Located on the corner of Biddle Avenue and St Johns.
Gold Star Bar - This is a true hidden gem, hard to find and filled mainly with locals because nobody else knows about it! The crowd is a mixed bag, some older, some twenty- and thirty-something. They've got a pool table, a jukebox, darts, and large screen TVs. This is a piece of Wyandotte history, so you have to at least go here once in your lifetime, and more than likely you'll be back. Nearly hidden on the corner of Vinewood and 9th Street!"I’m emotionally nosy about people, I think. I want to know what their story is," says Hannah Beckerman. A woman who wears many hats, she is well known to the trade as a chair at literary festivals and events, and she also reviews books for the Observer and the Sunday Express. But when we meet in a café in West London, it is to talk about her second novel, If Only I Could Tell You (February), which Orion is pitching as upmarket women’s fiction for fans of Jojo Moyes.
If Only I Could Tell You has at its heart a devastating family secret which has deeply affected three generations of women: matriarch Audrey; her two daughters Jess and Lily; and their respective daughters, Mia and Phoebe. The novel opens with a seemingly innocuous scene. It is a Thursday morning in June 1988 and Jess is 10 years old, waiting in the hallway for her teenage sister, Lily, so they can walk to school together. But then Jess decides to climb the stairs, and catches Lily coming out of the spare bedroom with a guilty expression on her face. She refuses to let Jess go into the room, or reveal what she has seen. Beckerman writes of Jess: "She does not know it yet, but by the time she gets home this afternoon, the fabric of her family will have been altered irrevocably, and the morning’s events will repeat in her mind like a record stuck under the groove of a needle for the next 30 years."
to bring her splintered family back together before it is too late.
"I’ll be amazed if I ever write a novel that isn’t about family," says Beckerman, a notably articulate interviewee. "I know lots of people are slightly sniffy about novels about family. But to my mind the family is the place where we learn the template for all of our future relationships, for good or for bad... [I find it] inherently fascinating."
It becomes clear that Jess is behind the estrangement with her sister, and throughout the novel the reader is constantly wondering what on earth Lily could have done when she was a young teenager that was so terrible, and so lasting. "So much of the book is about the way we interpret things differently. The same situations can be perceived completely differently, depending on the prism through which you are viewing them," says Beckerman.
The 10-year-old Jess has interpreted events a certain way. "If you’re a child and you don’t have all the pieces of the jigsaw, you do just tend to fill them in yourself. One of the key themes of the book is the toxicity of secrets and how things that are repressed will always find their way out—somewhere—into the narrative of the family," says Beckerman. "It might be in people’s behaviours, it might be in relationships, it might be in individuals acting out in a particular ways... but those repressed stories will always find their way out. So what I really wanted to do was explore how that toxicity affects each character in the novel, including the generation of girls who weren’t even alive when these things happened."
If Only I Could Tell You is cleverly structured and there is a half-point twist which changes everything—"compelling" is the word most used in the advance blurbs that adorn the cover of the novel’s proof copies—which Beckerman puts down to the "hard graft of endless redrafts". The final novel, she reckons, has been through 24 drafts in total. When commissioning editor Harriet Bourton acquired the book for Orion in May 2017, it was draft number 16. The role of the editor has come under fire recently—the Man Booker Prize judges were very critical of the editing of some of this year’s submissions—but Beckerman describes Bourton’s role as "transformative" in moving around the events of the novel to create "the sense of being slightly disorientated as to what is going on and whose version of reality is the right one."
It is Beckerman’s second novel, although Orion will be taking it to market as if it were a début. Her first, The Dead Wife’s Handbook, was published in 2014 by Penguin. It sold a modest number and the writer acknowledges, honestly: "If I was writing it now, I would write it in a very different way". In the four years since the publication of her début, she says she has written "a lot that hasn’t worked". She reckons she has probably put in Malcolm Gladwell’s fabled 10,000 hours, which has resulted in a much more finely crafted novel. "When you have your first novel published, you are quite naïve. You don’t understand the industry that well. You think that getting a book deal means you’ve won the literary lottery and that it’s all going to happen. But obviously, for 999 out of 1,000 books, that isn’t going to happen. Very few début novels actually punch through. So then you have to go back to the beginning and think, ‘Well if I haven’t been one of those bestselling début novelists, what kind of a writer do I want to be?’"
Writing a novel is one thing but—as she is well aware, from her experience chairing events at literary festivals—authors are now expected to go out and promote it too. The rise of the literary festival as part of the promotional circuit has been unstoppable in recent years. Beckerman sees a link with social media platforms: "I don’t know if [social media] has raised the expectation of audiences to want to have more real-life interaction with authors they are reading, or whether it’s the opposite: that so much of our interaction is happening digitally and online now that the desire to spend some time in a room listening to a real person talk has grown." Her secret to chairing a successful event? Being a swot, she says, with a laugh. "I write out four times as many questions as I could possibly get through. Then I learn it like a script, so at any point I can go anywhere with the conversation."
Next February, Beckerman will be on the other side of the stage, talking about her novel with its themes of grief, guilt and suppressed family secrets. But, she says, "I hope there are also moments of joy, and that you get to the end of the book with a sense of emotional closure, and an uplifting sense that even the worst situations are open to resolution."
It is a Thursday morning and Jess is walking up the stairs even though she has no need; she has already