You know, I think I'm just going to give up on Louise Erdrich. I liked The Master Butcher's Singing Club, and was okay with The Beet Queen and with parts of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. But with each of her books, it's a chore for me to read. It takes weeks, if longer occasionally. I pick them up and put them down. Sometimes, I'm rewarded with a line like "In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying." (The Beet Queen), but more often than not, I keep wondering when I'm going to get fully engaged in the story. And there is so much intertwining between the books, that I find it hard to separate the stories in my mind. (It's also kind of annoying, because if I wasn't that enthralled with them initially, do I really want to have them suddenly crop up in another book? I mean, really!)

Anyhow, this was Louise Erdrich, telling a story again. The writing is well crafted, but the story didn't grab me. I really had hoped it would. I also just looked at a list of books by this author and see I have read 5 out of 9 of her fiction books. Obviously, I am a slow learner, but you can't say I didn't give her a fair shake. If she writes an astounding book you can't put down, please be sure to tell me. ( )

From Booklist
"A bottle of orange pop, a cheap motel, and you." That's Lipsha Morrisey, the ne'er-do-well son of notorious criminal Gerry Nanapush, remembering the idyllic circumstances of his one night of passion with Shawnee Ray Toose, a young Chippewa who wants more than cheap motels. Readers of Louise Erdrich's three previous novels of life on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota will not only recognize the family names above, but will also hear in even this short sentence fragment the characteristic mix of irony, deep emotion, self-deprecating humor, and absurdity that drives Erdrich's supple prose. Unlike her earlier novels, however, this fourth in the series has at its center an old-fashioned love story--not that the vagaries of love have ever been less than paramount in Erdrich's world, but here the interlocked lives of the reservation's inhabitants seem to swirl as one around the axis of Lipsha's operatic, all-consuming if mostly unrequited love for Shawnee Ray: "The band plays slow wailing country love songs each evening and my heart gives, just sinks down, all riddled with holes. I leak love."

We're often uncomfortable when so much unadulterated feeling is spilled at our feet, but Erdrich is ready for our squeamishness, mixing romance and comedy with the skill of a master alchemist, diluting sentimentality while enhancing the emotional impact of the story. Lipsha's every romantic outburst is counterbalanced by a leavening dose of absurdity, as when the hapless lover embarks on a traditional vision quest to impress his beloved and encounters only a particularly odoriferous skunk. Not that magic doesn't play a role here; on the contrary, Lipsha's love seems to ignite the magic that lurks in the everyday, and if the love story of Lipsha and Shawnee Ray is left unfinished, the more complex, more entangled love story of Lipsha and his dead mother, June, begun in Love Medicine, reaches a stunning, magical, long-sought resolution.

Erdrich tells us that "no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our daily life to try. We chew the tough skins, we wonder." She has never chewed harder, nor wondered more beautifully, than in this profoundly moving, painfully funny, slapsticky love story.-- Bill Ott

I don't remember lots of details about this Erdrich book, though I remember loving it and laughing a lot. ( )

What a great writer she is. Her people are almost like neighbours to me now. I want to know more and more about them. All these lost souls who hang onto a very fine thread to their Native American heritage and scramble through life as best as they can.

more in her intertwined saga of her fictional tribe of American Indians -- along with Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen -- a great experience to read her work as a whole. ( )