Written by the author of "The Beet Queen" and "Tracks", this was Louise Erdrich's first novel and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Powerful with music and magic, crowded with exuberant life, it is the story of two Indian families living on a North Dakota reservation.
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Written by the author of "The Beet Queen" and "Tracks", this was Louise Erdrich's first novel and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. Powerful with music and magic, crowded with exuberant life, it is the story of two Indian families living on a North Dakota reservation.
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Louise Erdrich's novel of two intertwined Native American families is a complex, dizzying portrait of pain and love. Their entwined history is generations old, but as with many of Erdrich's books, this one isn't really about the plot, anyway. Erdrich's language is so rich, you could chew it. She has a very effective style that lands somewhere between plain-spoken and poetic, and the end result is a novel that I had trouble setting down. With all the hurt these people inflict upon each other, it may be difficult to parse out where "Love Medicine" comes into it, but ultimately this is not a book of despair. The love is there, just under the surface, keeping the pain of the book from devastating the reader.
twopercentcotton
Jun 1, 2007
Great novel
Erdrich's novel is actually a composite, a series of interconnected stories, each one independent yet related to the overall narrative (I would compare it to Amy Tan's Joy Luck Club). Erdrich's language is haunting and poetic, and at times humorous. Each "story" and each character pulls you into their world. Recommended.