I read this one a while ago, and don't recall any details. ( )

I read Erdrich's books in the wrong order; this one first. I adore her books in this series, although this is still my least favorite of them... I think perhaps I identified some characters as people in my life and got annoyed with them. Highly recommend the author but leaving the rating. ( )

Louise Erdrich is an excellent, compelling writer, with a fine sense of the quirks of human psychology, all of which is entirely evident in this early novel. And yet, it also feels a bit... off-kilter. I think it's that so many of the most pivotal events in it have this feeling of absurdity about them. Which I think is deliberate, but maybe it doesn't quite work for me? Most notably, there's the precipitating event of the whole story, in which a woman abandons her children in a strange, almost surreal sort of way: by buying a ticket for a ride in an airplane at a fair, and then just flying off with the pilot, forever. Which just kind of left me going, "huh?" for the rest of the novel. It's not that I have an issue with the absurd or the surreal, but there's something about it that just doesn't quite mesh with the more realistic aspects. And the characters have much the same kind of feel to them, really, that mix of the deeply believable and the weirdly over-the-top. And, while they and their inter-relationships are interesting, they're also often horrible and offputting, and there were times when I found myself getting tired of, or even disgusted with, their company.

And yet, even when she's doing things that don't 100% work... man, Erdrich can write.

Rating: It's impossible to know how to rate this, because it's either flawed but still really good or rather disappointing, depending on what standards I try to hold it to. I'm giving it a 3.5/5, but I don't know if I feel great about that. ( )

In the second of the Love Medicine series, Erdrich brings her German ancestry into the mix, with the story of how the strangely orphaned Adare children arrived in Argus, North Dakota, looking for their Aunt Fritzie, who runs a butcher shop with her husband. Mary Adare clashes with her cousin Sita; inherits the meat business; develops a bit of a crush on Russell Kashpaw, a veteran of two wars and many wounds; and finds unsettling friendship with Russell's half sister, Celestine, the mother of a child Mary would wish to call her own. Again, complex relationships, a mixture of past and present, and hints of untold tales begging to be revealed. The title's relevance does not come clear until very near the end, which I found a bit unsatisfactory. In fact, this one didn't work especially well for me, possibly because it was all new---I hadn't read this one before. I think Erdrich is like Faulkner in this regard...she cannot simply be read, she must be re-read (with a nod to Jay Parini, who made the observation about Uncle Billy in the first place). ( )

Richly imagined. A small town in North Dakota. A steady intensity, people struggling, finding ways to make meaning. Desperate lushness. ( )