LaRose by Louise Erdrich

National Book Award Winner Louise Erdrich begins her new novel, LaRose, with a punch to the gut: a hunting accident involving Landreaux Iron results in the death of his neighbor’s five-year-old son Dusty Ravich.  The two families had been close; the mothers were half-sisters, the five-year-old sons best friends.  Grief works in different ways on the two families and soon the Irons decide to honor an ancient tradition in order to make up for the Ravichs’ loss.  The Iron’s give their five-year-old son LaRose to the Ravich family.  Between a sweeping history of the four previous generations of LaRoses, and the story of Landreaux Iron’s past, Erdrich weaves a tale of loss and love.  LaRose grows to be a bond between the two families, helping them process their grief.  This deeply emotional read is another powerful novel from a talented award-winning author.

The Toughest Indian In the World by Sherman Alexie

When one reads realistic fiction, you expect to see the many areas of life with which we all wrestle: love, lust, anger, fear, sadness, joy and so on.  This is why reading books of short stories can be so rewarding.  I felt each of these emotions in turn as I read: Saint Junior describes the love between a man a wife and what that love means as time ticks by.  Assimilation tells about an American Indian woman (Coeur d’Alene) married to a white man who wants to have sex with an Indian man.  Any Indian man. Class gives the reader the story of an Indian man married to “the tenth most beautiful white woman in the room” and how he processes the resentment of her affairs and the loss of their child.  The entirety of Sin Eaters is filled with a terror that steadily creeps along your skin as you read about a future in which American Indians are captured and forced to reproduce.  Indian Country tells of a successful writer who discovers that his long-distance lover has eloped with another man and finds himself in the middle of a tense dinner with mostly strangers. South by Southwest is about a man who holds up an IHOP and takes a hostage, hoping to discover love.  The collection’s final story, One Good Man, ticked all of these boxes while continually asking the question: What is an Indian?

Sherman Alexie’s The Toughest Indian in the World is a book of stories written by a Spokane/Coeur d’Alene man who has spent his life thinking and writing about being an American Indian. It is a heartfelt look at life and the many types of people who inhabit it. Alexie is also the author of many other books of short stories including The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven and the acclaimed Young Adult novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Check out some of his fiction at the library today.

The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Winner of the National Books Award in 2012, The Round House is just as much a coming of age story as it is a crime drama.  Our narrator, thirteen-year-old Joe, is faced with an event that will change life on a North Dakota reservation as he knows it.  His mother Geraldine is attacked and assaulted on a Sunday in the summer of 1988.  With no one else to turn to, her husband Bazil (the local tribal judge) confides in Joe and together the two begin to piece together the details of the attack.  Reservation politics make it difficult to determine where the crime was committed and who should be held responsible and Joe and his father fight for normalcy as they watch Geraldine sink lower and lower into solitude and fear.  As the summer days pass by, Joe and his three friends manage to find out who the attacker is and go to great lengths to seek justice.  Readers who enjoyed Erdrich’s other family sagas such as Love Medicine will recognize many of the names (Mooshum, Nanapush) that crop up time and again.  This book is filled with the quiet grace and heart-breaking complexity of Erdrich’s other novels and paints a truthful portrait of a family who struggles to survive the emotional aftermath of a horrific crime.