![]() ![]() My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. They had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. It’s a Sunday morning in the summer of 1988, and he and his father are outside trying to dig out the sprouting seedlings. I was a bit dismayed by the blunt metaphor we find in the book’s very first sentence: “Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” Our narrator is Joe Coutts, a thirteen-year-old boy of the Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota. Full of potential, I found The Round House to be a bit of a mess. Thrilled she won, yes, because she’s an exceptional American author. Honestly, though, now that I’ve read it, I find myself questioning the judges. ![]() The Round House by Louise Erdrich (2012) HarperCollins (2012) 323 ppĪ recent convert to Louise Erdrich, I was excited when The Round House won the National Book Award last month, the first major award Erdrich has taken home since she won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her debut novel, Love Medicine, in 1984. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |