LaRose

On an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, in the late summer of 1999, Landreaux Iron is hunting a deer at the edge of his neighbor's land when the animal moves and his shot kills Dusty Ravich, five years old and his own son's best friend. After consulting the priest, Father Travis, and praying in a sweat lodge, Landreaux and his wife Emmaline do what an older form of justice asks: they give their own five year old, LaRose, to Dusty's parents, Peter and Nola Ravich, to raise as their son. Nola is Emmaline's half sister, which makes the arrangement both possible and unbearable.

Louise Erdrich follows what that gift does to everyone. Nola, sunk in grief, drifts toward suicide, and it is the small boy who keeps her alive; her daughter Maggie, prickly and fierce, becomes LaRose's sister and protector; the boy moves between the two houses and slowly becomes the bridge between them. Around the families circle Father Travis, a war veteran who is in love with Emmaline, and Romeo Puyat, a drug addled grifter who has nursed an old grudge against Landreaux and who starts gathering information about the shooting. Interleaved with the present day is the story of the first LaRose, an Ojibwe girl sold by her mother at a trading post in 1839, raped, party to the killing of her rapist, and robbed even in death when white scientists carried off her bones, and of the healers who carried the name after her. Kirkus noted that the book's last stretch "reads like a thriller" as Romeo raises doubts about whether the shooting was truly an accident.

This is a discursive book, patient with digression and with a large cast, and it rewards a reader willing to let its strands braid at their own pace. It shares its setting with The Round House and closes the sequence begun with The Plague of Doves. Publishers Weekly praised its "masterly finesse," and Kirkus called it "electric, nimble, and perceptive." It suits readers who liked The Round House and anyone interested in how a community absorbs a death without a courtroom.