A review by lizmart88
Love Medicine, by Louise Erdrich
Tbh, it took me two tries to get through this book, but it was so worth it. I highly recommend really reviewing the family chart at the beginning of the book to understand the complicated connections between people. Understanding those relationships made the stories much easier to understand.
The book is classified as a novel. To me, it felt like a set of really interconnected short stories, featuring recurring characters. I loved this structure.
The stories feature members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, and Pillager families who all live in the same town. Centered in Native American experiences, the families experience the push and pull of colonization as they fall in and out of love, raise children, and find their place in the world. It's set in 1960s-1980s.
The structure was genius because you see later stories reveal new facts and perceptions from earlier stories. You see the same story from multiple perspectives (though never wholesale same story, usually snippets). And Louise Erdrich is a master of dropping tidbits in stories that slowly lead to a revelation.
Definitely recommend picking this up. She has written about 30 books - this was one of her first. I'm excited to check out later ones. There's even a few books that feature some of the characters from this book!
The book is classified as a novel. To me, it felt like a set of really interconnected short stories, featuring recurring characters. I loved this structure.
The stories feature members of the Kashpaw, Lamartine, and Pillager families who all live in the same town. Centered in Native American experiences, the families experience the push and pull of colonization as they fall in and out of love, raise children, and find their place in the world. It's set in 1960s-1980s.
The structure was genius because you see later stories reveal new facts and perceptions from earlier stories. You see the same story from multiple perspectives (though never wholesale same story, usually snippets). And Louise Erdrich is a master of dropping tidbits in stories that slowly lead to a revelation.
Definitely recommend picking this up. She has written about 30 books - this was one of her first. I'm excited to check out later ones. There's even a few books that feature some of the characters from this book!