Shadow Tag by Louise Erdrich, another rich story, this and The Painted Drum. Both of them develop the complex relationships that Erdrich has in her other novels, but the essay I’m writing won’t include them. The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse won’t be included either even though it is one of my Erdrich favorites, that and The Antelope Wife, which I am using in the essay.
While I was at the SSML conference, Jane Hamilton was given the fiction award. The characters of her novel The Book of Ruth remind me of some of Erdrich’s characters: their struggle to simply get through life after having been raised in an environment of scarcity, abuse, and the like.
