The Antelope Wife

The Antelope Wife moves between the years after the Civil War, near the border of North Dakota and Minnesota, and Minneapolis in the late 1990s, following several Ojibwe families whose lives are knotted together. Its first story is a cavalry raid on an Ojibwe village. Scranton Roy, a private in the United States Cavalry, bayonets a woman, then follows a dog carrying a baby on a cradleboard, takes the infant and raises her himself, until her mother, Blue Prairie Woman, reclaims her. Later the girl is sheltered by a herd of antelope, and what happened in that raid runs down through the generations.

In the present, Klaus Shawano uses what he believes is antelope medicine to trap a beautiful woman, Sweetheart Calico, and brings her from the plains to Minneapolis, away from her children. She falls into silence and drink. Rozin Whiteheart Beads, fascinated by her, meets Frank Shawano and begins an affair with him. Rozin's husband, Richard, tries to kill himself in a sealed garage and by accident kills one of their twin daughters, Deanna; after Rozin marries Frank, Richard takes his own life. The surviving twin, Cally, discovers that her spirit name is Blue Prairie Woman, and Sweetheart Calico at last gives up the blue beads she has held under her tongue for years and asks to be let go.

Erdrich tells all this in many voices, one of them a dog's, and frames the book's sections with the story of twin sisters beading, one with light beads and one with dark, each trying to outdo the other. It is not an easy book to keep straight. Kirkus wished for a genealogy and thought too many explanations were "hastily knotted together at the end," while still calling it a "powerful and dauntingly elliptical tale" and "as satisfying as any Erdrich has written." Readers who know Love Medicine or Tracks will recognize her way of letting a family's history arrive in pieces, out of order, and adding up only near the end.