Written over the past two decades, Louise Erdrich’s story collection features a range of characters—a tribal newsletter editor whose son tells her a story that nothing in her experience can encompass, immigrant farmers whose tenuous hold on the earth, and sanity, is challenged, and ordinary people, bird lovers, artists, grade-school teachers, and romantics. A girl decides to spend her life with a stone. A man is confronted with a folk-singing thief. A woman enters a corporately owned afterlife to seek revenge on her father.
Testifies to the intrepidity of her explorations and her commitment to blurring boundaries ... Thrilling ... Intricate yet vast ... Ouroboros-like, Erdrich is in continual, self-devouring motion and thus presents a kind of constancy of transmutation — identity itself becomes a variable in the endless calculation of renewal. This is storytelling as wisdom magic: These are wonders to be cherished and pondered.
Louise Erdrich has been described as one of the greatest American writers, and this collection lives up to that billing. There are all the usual little writerly things – the disarming understatement of her phrasing, the elegance of structure, the graceful layering of meaning under apparent simplicity – while she still manages to avoid the problem of contrivance ... Every story is intriguing, most are funny, many poignant.
