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Summary
Summary
In this literary masterwork, Louise Erdrich, the bestselling author of the National Book Award-winning The Round House and the Pulitzer Prize nominee The Plague of Doves wields her breathtaking narrative magic in an emotionally haunting contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture.
North Dakota, late summer, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence--but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich.
The youngest child of his friend and neighbor, Peter Ravich, Dusty was best friends with Landreaux's five-year-old son, LaRose. The two families have always been close, sharing food, clothing, and rides into town; their children played together despite going to different schools; and Landreaux's wife, Emmaline, is half sister to Dusty's mother, Nola. Horrified at what he's done, the recovered alcoholic turns to an Ojibwe tribe tradition--the sweat lodge--for guidance, and finds a way forward. Following an ancient means of retribution, he and Emmaline will give LaRose to the grieving Peter and Nola. "Our son will be your son now," they tell them.
LaRose is quickly absorbed into his new family. Plagued by thoughts of suicide, Nola dotes on him, keeping her darkness at bay. His fierce, rebellious new "sister," Maggie, welcomes him as a coconspirator who can ease her volatile mother's terrifying moods. Gradually he's allowed shared visits with his birth family, whose sorrow mirrors the Raviches' own. As the years pass, LaRose becomes the linchpin linking the Irons and the Raviches, and eventually their mutual pain begins to heal.
But when a vengeful man with a long-standing grudge against Landreaux begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died, he threatens the tenuous peace that has kept these two fragile families whole.
Inspiring and affecting, LaRose is a powerful exploration of loss, justice, and the reparation of the human heart, and an unforgettable, dazzling tour de force from one of America's most distinguished literary masters.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Erdrich spins a powerful, resonant story with masterly finesse. As in The Round House, she explores the quest for justice and the thirst for retribution. Again, the setting-a North Dakota Ojibwe reservation and a nearby town-adds complexity to the plot. Landreaux Iron, an Ojibwe man, accidentally shoots and kills the five-year-old son of his best friend, farmer Peter Ravich, who is not a member of the tribe. After a wrenching session with his Catholic priest, Father Travis, and a soul-searching prayer in a sweat lodge, Landreaux gives his own five-year-old son, LaRose, to grieving Peter and his wife, Nola, who is half-sister to Landreaux's own wife, Emmaline. In the years that follow, LaRose becomes a bridge between his two families. He also accesses powers that have distinguished his namesakes in previous generations, when LaRose was "a name both innocent and powerful, and had belonged to the family's healers." Erdrich introduces this mystical element seamlessly, in the same way that LaRose and other Ojibwes recognize and communicate with "the active presence of the spirit world." The magical aspects are lightened by scenes of everyday life: old ladies in an assisted-living home squabble about sex; teenage girls create their own homemade beauty spa. Erdrich raises suspense by introducing another, related act of retribution, culminating in a memorable and satisfying ending. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor's young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to "an old form of justice" by giving his own son, LaRose, to the parents of his victim. Erdrich, whose last novel, The Round House, won the National Book Award in 2012, sets this meditative, profoundly humane story in the time just before the U.S. invades Iraq but wanders in and out of that moment, even back to origin tales about the beginning of time. On tribal lands in rural North Dakota, the shooter, Landreaux Iron, and his wife, Emmaline, trudge toward their neighbors' house to say, "Our son will be your son now." As both families amble through the emotional thickets produced by this act (the wives are half sisters, to boot), Erdrich depicts a tribal culture that is indelible and vibrant: Romeo, a drug-addled grifter still smarting from a years-ago abandonment by his friend Landreaux (and whose hurt makes this novel a revenge story); war vet Father Travis, holy but in love with Emmaline; and LaRose, his father's "little man, his favorite child," the fifth generation of LaRoses in his family, who confers with his departed ancestors and summons a deep, preternatural courage to right an injustice done to his new sister. Erdrich's style is discursive; a long digression about the first LaRose and her darkness haunts this novel. Just when she needs to, though, Erdrich races toward an ending that reads like a thriller as doubts emerge about Landreaux's intentions the day he went hunting. Electric, nimble, and perceptive, this novel is about "the phosphorous of grief" but also, more essentially, about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Erdrich has perfected the meteor-strike novel tales that begin with an out-of-the-blue, catastrophic event, and then track the ensuing shock waves. This dramatic structure shapes Erdrich's National Book Award-winning The Round House (2012) and takes on even more intensity here. Two neighboring families live in a North Dakota community in which many of the Ojibwe are related, memories are long, and the wounds of the war against Native Americans run deep: Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. The women, half-sisters, do not get along; their husbands have become friends. Landreaux and Emmaline Iron are raising five children, including their youngest, LaRose, a preternaturally soulful five-year-old boy. Nola and her white husband, Peter Ravich, have Maggie and Dusty, born at the same time as Dusty's favorite playmate, LaRose. The summer of 1999 is waning, the Y2K scare growing, and Landreaux, a physical-therapy assistant devoted to his clients and guided by both Ojibwe beliefs and the Catholic Church, is hunting. He's a crack shot, but when he pulls the trigger, the deer flees, and Dusty falls. Landreaux and Emmaline make a devastating decision: they will give LaRose to Nola and Peter. Our son will be your son, Landreaux says. It's the old way. As Erdrich explores the inevitable anguish and complications inherent in this act of sacrifice and attempt at justice, she takes soundings of the wellsprings of trauma and strength shaping these grieving households. The time frame shifts to 1839 when a trading post stood on the land the Irons now occupy. There a desperate Ojibwe woman from a mysterious and violent family trades her daughter for rum, igniting a terrifying sequence of passion, murder, and supernatural revenge. Gliding back and forth in time, Erdrich follows the long line of healers named LaRose, and reveals Landreaux's long-hidden past tied to a boarding school designed to sever Native American children from their roots, as well as his volatile relationship with a fellow student named Romeo, now a brooding, plotting, outlaw loner in the grip of substance abuse, poverty, and rage. Their simmering conflict is a key aspect of Erdrich's increasingly suspenseful inquiry into the repercussions of vengeance. The radiance of this many-faceted novel is generated by Erdrich's tenderness for her characters, beginning with the profoundly involving primary figures. But there's also Father Travis, crucial to The Round House and reappearing here in all his rigor, incisiveness, and unruly desires. A circle of bawdy elder women and the smart and funny sisters Snow and Josette (among the young characters who will fascinate advanced teen readers) provide comic relief and covertly wise counsel, while Peter's extreme preparedness for the turn-of-the-millennium apocalypse offers a piquant reflection on questions of fear and faith. LaRose is the fifteenth novel in Erdrich's magnificent North Dakota cycle about the painful and proud legacy and intricately entangled relationships among Native Americans, whites, and people of mixed heritage, a brilliantly imagined and constructed saga of empathy, elegy, spirituality, resilience, wit, wonder, and hope that will stand as a defining master work of American literature for generations to come.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
A RAGE FOR ORDER: The Middle East in Turmoil, From Tahrir Square to ISIS, by Robert F. Worth. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $15.) A masterly account of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, and the region's decline into violence and anarchy, by a former New York Times foreign correspondent. Our reviewer, Kenneth M. Pollack, called the book "a marvel of storytelling, with the chapters conjuring a poignancy fitting for the subject." THE MIRROR THIEF, by Martin Seay. (Melville House, $17.99.) Linked narratives brimming with delightful, esoteric detail unfold in three Venices: 16thcentury Italy; 1950s Venice Beach, Calif. ; and the Venetian casino in Las Vegas in 2003. A card counter, the man hired to track him down and an oblique book of poems weave through a series of schemes in this novel, with a structure that recalls David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas." FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, by Timothy Garton Ash. (Yale University, $22.) Protected speech is under siege on a wide front and is caught up in a number of modern controversies, from the role of government surveillance to the criminalization of hate speech and the prosecution of whistle-blowers. Garton Ash examines 10 such cases, framed with his call for "more free speech but also better speech." THE NEST, by Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney. (Ecco/ HarperCollins, $16.99.) A $2 million trust fund is set aside for the Plumb siblings, who are each counting on their share to rescue them from financial straits. But months before they are set to receive the money, Leo, the eldest, squanders a majority of the sum after a car accident; the ensuing family drama of "firstworld problems proves to be an enjoyable comedy of manners as Sweeney artfully skewers family dynamics," our reviewer, Patricia Park, wrote. LAROSE, by Louise Erdrich. (Harper Perennial, $15.99.) While hunting buck, Landreaux does the worst thing imaginable: He accidentally kills his best friend's child. As penance, he offers his own son, LaRose, to the grieving parents, setting in motion a powerful story of ancestry, justice and forgiveness. JOE GOULD'S TEETH, by Jill Lepore. (Vintage, $16.) Gould - a New York eccentric friendly with many of the early 20th century's bestknown artists - decided to record everything anyone said to him, aiming to "widen the sphere of history as Walt Whitman did that of poetry." The project, known as "The Oral History of Our Time," acquired a near-mythic status - and then some wondered if it ever existed at all. Lepore, a New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian, sets out to discover the manuscript's fate.
Library Journal Review
Erdrich's most recent novel (after the National Book Award winner The Round House) acquaints us once again with members of the Peace family, though a different branch from the one in A Plague of Doves. The wives in two households, Nola and Emmaline, are half sisters, daughters of retired schoolteacher LaRose Peace. LaRose is an old family name that originally belonged to the family progenitor, a native girl who married a fur trader's young assistant. Nola and Peter have two children, Dusty and -Maggie. -Emmaline and husband Landreaux Iron have four, including their youngest son, LaRose, plus a foster son. In the book's first pages, the two families become inextricably conjoined when Landreaux kills Dusty in a hunting accident, and Emmaline and Landreaux make the agonizing decision to right this accidental wrong with an old form of justice: giving LaRose to the grieving family. The decision reverberates through the two sets of parents and siblings, and the community beyond. VERDICT Erdrich creates a contained world in the dying prairie town of Pluto, a reservation border village, where white and tribal history come together and where Catholic and traditional spirit worlds, modernity and the forbidding past, all intersect. [See Prepub Alert, 11/2/15.]-Reba Leiding, emeritus, James -Madison Univ. Lib., Harrisonburg, VA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.