A review by janedoelish
Fools Crow by James Welch

5.0

Elegiac magical realism takes the readers into a world about to (virtually) end, telling a tale of a band of Blackfeet in 1870. It is a tale of loss, of inevitability, of facing insurmountable obstacles and knowing you won't be able to clear them. Welch engenders a deep understanding of his characters, and avoids painting the encroaching white settlers in terms of the starkest blacks, even while leaving no doubt whatsoever about the enormity of the crime taking place. Through him, readers begin to grasp how ordinary people can become complicit in atrocity just by being part of a faceless system regarded as "the way things are". We should take careful note, for this sort of mechanism is still at work.