RaveThe Seattle TimesLouise Erdrich revisits the harsh and many-storied land that has figured so prominently in her novels and short stories, a place where early would-be settlers face the most hostile conditions imaginable...But those natural terrors are only the backdrop to Erdrich's absorbing, sometimes horrifying story. It is human beings in their madness, fear and vengeance that create the real horror … Erdrich tells her story, or rather her skein of tightly interwoven stories, in flashbacks and in the voices of various characters, as each strand, like the ropes with which the three innocent Indians were hanged, loops back on itself. It is as if in the grim psychological landscape these people inhabit, the past remains utterly present.
