The Kashpaw family lives on a North Dakota reservation and its branches are convoluted and multiple. They are connected loosely to the Nanapush family through the illegitimate son of June Morrisey (adopted daughter of the Kashpaws) and Gerry Nanapush. Love Medicine follows the lives of the multiple characters of these two families, weaving backward and forward through time to establish their connections to each other.

The novel opens with June Kashpaw’s final one night stand. As the character who connects both families through her illicit affair with Gerry Nanapush (resulting in the birth of their son Lipsha), it seems appropriate that Erdrich begins her story with June. But Love Medicine is really about the two matriarchs of the converging families: Marie Kashpaw and Lulu Nanapush Lamartine. These women – strong, sharply spoken, and brave – are the characters around whom the novel spins. Marie comes from a poor and unstable home and turns initially to the Catholic Church…only to discover that evil can live anywhere.

Lulu moves from man to man, seeking the love she never really had, and raises eight boys from different fathers. Both women fall in love with the same man: Nector Kashpaw. Yet, although this is at its heart a family saga, Erdrich reveals herself as a brilliant writer by drawing on deeper themes of love, loss, religion and belief, and the dark underpinnings of reservation life and politics.

Writing from multiple viewpoints across many years, Erdrich gradually builds the core of her novel and connects the two families. Her reflections on faith and religion weave in and out of the narrative.

Erdrich does not sugar-coat the problems found on reservations – alcoholism, sexual promiscuity and domestic violence. Yet despite these difficult subjects, she finds room for empathy for her characters. Impacted by tragedy, her characters often reveal their resiliency to despair.

Erdrich’s writing is often dreamlike and poetic. Her prose resonates with compassion, anger and a deep understanding of the challenges Native Americans have faced. I was carried along by Erdrich’s honest writing into a world I had little knowledge of before. Despite the multiple characters, I had no trouble following their lives and connections (although Erdrich does provide a helpful family tree at the beginning of the novel).

Love Medicine is a novel about the interconnectedness of family, personal despair and triumph, and the truths upon which our lives are built. Brilliant, powerful and beautifully wrought…this is a novel I highly recommend. ( )

Best book I ever read about Native American life. ( )

A chronicle spanning most of the twentieth century about a few Ojibwa families.

This is a powerful multigenerational saga of two extended families that live on and around a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. The family members are full of despair and hope as they cope with insensitive government policies, poverty, alcoholism, and love.

Somewhere Erdrich's style was compared to Faulkner's (narrative from multiple points of view). Love Medicine is more accessible, in my opinion. ( )