Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich
Jun. 5th, 2010 12:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aJust finished reading Love Medicine aloud with Kimberly. We've been working on it for about a month, which is our typical read-aloud speed. This was my second read of Love Medicine, the first being somewhere in the 1999-2001 range. I remembered very little of it, which is my usual experience with books that I've read more than a couple of years ago.
Love Medicine is a collection of short stories centering on several families in an Indian reservation in North Dakota. Erdrich has somewhat angrily declaimed that the book is a novel, not a collection of short stories, but, well, it is what it is. There's certainly been effort made to connect everything together in an interesting way, especially in the second edition, and the whole is surely greater than its parts, but on the other hand it's also a set of a dozen or so stories and only the last few really dovetail things together to any large degree.
As with my last read, I quite adore the book. It's smart, touching, and full of interesting people. It offers up an often heartbreaking, but always honest-feeling look at an modern Indians. It also has a very interesting plot structure (if you do consider it as a book-length piece). It starts at the end, circles through the beginning, then returns full circle. And I don't mean that it's just a framed story. Everything builds on everything.
Kimberly and I are planning to read through this series over time. I've previously read through the first five of Erdrich's novels set in this area of North Dakota, but there's now at least 10 of them. I'm looking forward both to what I've read before and the new ones.
I expect we'll start the next in a couple of months, as we're reading Soldier of Arrete next, and then probably Dresden #7.
Love Medicine is a collection of short stories centering on several families in an Indian reservation in North Dakota. Erdrich has somewhat angrily declaimed that the book is a novel, not a collection of short stories, but, well, it is what it is. There's certainly been effort made to connect everything together in an interesting way, especially in the second edition, and the whole is surely greater than its parts, but on the other hand it's also a set of a dozen or so stories and only the last few really dovetail things together to any large degree.
As with my last read, I quite adore the book. It's smart, touching, and full of interesting people. It offers up an often heartbreaking, but always honest-feeling look at an modern Indians. It also has a very interesting plot structure (if you do consider it as a book-length piece). It starts at the end, circles through the beginning, then returns full circle. And I don't mean that it's just a framed story. Everything builds on everything.
Kimberly and I are planning to read through this series over time. I've previously read through the first five of Erdrich's novels set in this area of North Dakota, but there's now at least 10 of them. I'm looking forward both to what I've read before and the new ones.
I expect we'll start the next in a couple of months, as we're reading Soldier of Arrete next, and then probably Dresden #7.