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Loading... The Round House (2012)by Louise Erdrich
  
Female Author (655) » 16 more SantaThing 2014 Gifts (134) Carole's List (323) I Could Live There (38) A Boy's Life (80) Best Feminist Books (103) Excellent read and great teaching. (  ) ibkennedy | Jul 16, 2018 |  You can't argue with Erdrich's expertise in spinning a story. Here she tells the story of Joe, who is looking back on his 13th year, when his mother was brutally raped by a white man. A tale of injustice, revenge, family, community, it reminded me a little of [To Kill a Mockingbird], if it were set on a Native American reservation (though there's not a courtroom scene). Certainly the father is as noble as Atticus. Joe is 13, though, and this is also a coming of age story, with a 13-year-old's perspective on sex and its complications. He hangs out with 3 best friends, and those relationships are expertly delineated. Native American traditions and stories are relayed through a rambunctious but frail elder, and it's interesting to contemplate how those stories relate to the events of the novel. (  ) deckla | Jul 5, 2018 | This book is a haunting tale of a brutal rape on an American Indian reservation and the quest for elusive justice. Set in 1988, it's told from the point of view of the victim's 13-year-old son, who's just beginning to truly notice the world he inhabits. It won the National Book Award for fiction in 2012...deservedly so, in my opinion. I also enjoyed all of the Star Trek: The Next Generation references. ( ) poppycock77 | May 26, 2018 | There are so many wonderful Native American writers. This story was different as at least some of the people were solidly middle class, not just getting by. The story was well told and pulled me along even if the miscreant was telegraphed. Read this for a book club. Might not have picked it up otherwise. ( ) abycats | May 11, 2018 | I have discovered a new author that I enjoy very much. Louise Erdrich's novel won the National Book Award, and sometimes that can be a big hit or miss with how much I enjoy it. This one was a hit for me as I loved her writing style, character development, and the fact that she did not necessarily shoot for the happy ending throughout the book. The look into Native American culture of the upper Mid-West was also very well done and I felt immersed in the setting. I look forward to reading more of this author in the future. ( ) msaucier818 | Apr 9, 2018 |
 With “The Round House,” her 14th novel, Louise Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many earlier books, and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin. This time she focuses on one nuclear family — the 13-year-old Joe Coutts; his mother, Geraldine; and his father, Judge Antone Coutts — that is shattered and remade after a terrible event. Although its plot suffers from a schematic quality that inhibits Ms. Erdrich’s talent for elliptical storytelling, the novel showcases her extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together. “The Round House” — a National Book Award finalist in the fiction category — opens out to become a detective story and a coming-of-age story, a story about how Joe is initiated into the sadnesses and disillusionments of grown-up life and the somber realities of his people’s history.  “The Round House” represents something of a departure for Erdrich, whose past novels of Indian life have usually relied on a rotating cast of narrators, a kind of storytelling chorus. Here, though, Joe is the only narrator, and the urgency of his account gives the action the momentum and tight focus of a crime novel, which, in a sense, it is. But for Erdrich, “The Round House” is also a return to form. Each new Erdrich novel adds new layers of pathos and comedy, earthiness and spiritual questing, to her priceless multigenerational drama. “The Round House’’ is one of her best — concentrated, suspenseful, and morally profound. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, is always in pursuit of great new books. And today, Louise Erdrich's latest "The Round House." I interviewed her earlier this week about the novel. Now, here's Alan's take and he says it's her best yet.
No descriptions found. When his mother, a tribal enrollment specialist living on a reservation in North Dakota, slips into an abyss of depression after being brutally attacked, 14-year-old Joe Coutz sets out with his three friends to find the person that destroyed his family.… (more) |
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