On a windblown bluff above Lake Superior sits a fieldstone church. Founded one hundred years ago after a puzzling encounter with a flock of pelicans le?aves Lavinia with a curious notion, Pelican Church still draws inquisitive souls to its pews with the legend that one solitary bird still circles overhead, watching. These people have notions of their own — a pastor's wife wants a honeymoon, a professor has harebrained ideas, a business owner is in everyone's face, a young actress can do or be anything onstage yet struggles with every real-life decision — and their stories, tucked away for years, unfold and glide onto the pages of Donna Salli's intimate debut novel. The people of Pelican Church are oh-so-human and expose their mix of shifting hopes and obsessions, protected infidelities, and notions gone awry as one October day swings from sun-up to sundown under the watchful gaze of a single pelican.