Where to Start Guide: Louise Erdrich

Love Medicine
Sometimes prolific novelists take a few books to warm up, but that’s not the case with Erdrich. Her very first novel, 1984’s Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and introduced many of the characters that populated her subsequent books. The book spans sixty years and centers on the love triangle between members of the Ojibwa tribe living on the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation in North Dakota: Nector Kashpaw, the woman he marries, Marie Lazarre, and the woman he always loved, Lulu Nanapush. As is typical of the cliché-free love stories Erdrich writes, despite affairs and burning houses, there are no hard feelings.

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
This 2001 book, a finalist for the National Book Award, is what I would name as my favorite of Erdrich’s if forced to choose one. The story reaches back to 1910 to tell the tale of Father Damien Modeste, priest on the Little No Horse reservation, whose parishioners include the Nanpush and Kashpaw families. Father Damien is a woman who has lived as a man his whole life, and now, eighty years after coming to the reservation, he fears his secret will be discovered.

The Red Convertible
Erdrich is a master novelist, but this collection of stories drawn from throughout her career proves she’s a first-rate short fiction writer too. She was skilled at the beginning of her career, but her art has grown increasingly refined as her stories have become ever more surprising, raw, and moving. The cast of characters will be familiar to Erdrich fans, but the tales are fresh, including that of a wild moose chase (“Le Mooz”), a breast-feeding adoptive father (“Father’s Milk”), a middle-schooler’s hideous dress (“The Dress”), and a souped-up van offered as a bingo hall prize (“The Bingo Van”).

The Round House
Erdrich’s most recent novel, 2012’s The Round House, was the well-deserving winner of the National Book Award. It tells the tale of Geraldine Coutts, a beloved mother and wife on an Indian reservation in North Dakota, who is raped. Her husband and thirteen-year-old son, who winningly narrates the book, are determined to solve the crime. Erdrich always writes with heart, but she seems to have written this novel with an extra measure of it—in the afterword, she thanks everyone who got her through her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment during the book’s completion, and notes, “This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists.” Erdrich has become an advocate of changing these flawed laws.

The Birchbark House
Every Erdrich novel is a great read, but for my last selection I suggest her collection of novels for young readers that begins with 1999’s The Birchbark House. This charming, yet unstintingly realistic novel tells the story of Omakayas, a girl whose name means Little Frog, who is growing up near Lake Superior in the 1840s. This makes a great companion series for those who love the Little House on the Prairie Books, telling a story just as strong and detailed, set just a few decades before the Little House books, but from an entirely different perspective. I’ve already started my daughter on these books and I expect our family’s affection for Erdrich’s work to include as many generations as her stories do.