LaRose (Erdrich) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
The name LaRose is inscribed many times across the cover of this fine novel by Louise Erdrich. And we do meet a boy named LaRose shortly after the book begins. He is but five years old. He is an Ojibwa boy who walks between two worlds, just beginning to sense the spirit world. There have been other LaRoses in his family and their stories are deftly woven into this novel.  READ MORE.
Keddy Ann Outlaw - LitLovers


Incandescent…Erdrich has always been fascinated by the relationship between revenge and justice, but…. LaRose comes down firmly on the side of forgiveness. Can a person do the worst possible thing and still be loved? Erdrich’s answer is a resounding yes.
Mary Gordon - New York Times Book Review


[Erdrich] is, like Faulkner, one of the great American regionalists, bearing the dark knowledge of her place, as he did his. She is by now among the very best of American writers.
Philip Roth - New York Times


I’m one of those Erdrich enthusiasts who nonetheless balks at her penchant for embellishing stories with traditional Indian sorcery. In this case, LaRose is the fourth to bear his name, all of whom were women healers able to fly and defy other laws of physics.... [Still, over the years, Erdrich] has presented us with a splendid panorama of Native-American life unprecedented in our literary history, forever changing Americans’ sense of who they are and what they have been.
Dan Cryer - Newsday


Remarkable…As the novel draws to a conclusion, the suspense is ratcheted up, but never at the expense of Erdrich’s reflective power or meditative lyricism…One of Erdrich’s finest achievements.
Boston Globe


A masterly tale of grief and love…Erdrich never missteps…The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists that there are abiding spirits in this land and alternative ways of living and forgiving that have somehow survived the West’s best efforts to snuff them out.
Washington Post


[Erdrich] has laid out one of the most arresting visions of America in one of its most neglected corners, a tableaux on par with Faulkner, a place both perilous and haunted, cursed and blessed.
Chicago Tribune


[A] sad, wise, funny novel, in which [Erdrich] takes the native storytelling tradition that informs her work and remakes it for the modern world, stitching its tattered remnants into a vibrant living fabric.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


The rewards of LaRose lie in the quick unraveling and the slow reconstruction of these lives to a moment when animosities resolve, like shards of glass in a kaleidoscope, into clarity and understanding...Told with constraint and conviction.
Los Angeles Times


You’re going to want to take your time with this book, so lavish in its generational scope, its fierce torrent of wrongs and its luxurious heart. Anyway, you may have no choice, as you fall under the spell of a master… Like Toni Morrison, like Tolstoy, like Steinbeck, Erdrich writes her characters with a helpless love and witnesses them with a supreme absence of judgment…[a] beautiful novel.
San Francisco Chronicle


Erdrich suffuses the book with her particular sort of magic—an ability to treat each character with singular care, weaving their separate journeys flawlessly.... All the while, she adds new depth to timeless concepts of revenge, culture, and family.
Entertainment Weekly


(Starred review.) Erdrich spins a powerful, resonant story with masterly finesse...explor[ing] the quest for justice and the thirst for retribution.... Erdrich introduces [a] mystical element seamlessly...[and those] magical aspects are lightened by scenes of everyday life.... [A] memorable and satisfying ending.
Publishers Weekly


Set in 1999 North Dakota, this new work concludes a trilogy begun with the Anisfield-Wolf Award winner The Plague of Doves and the National Book Award winner The Round House.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) The radiance of this many-faceted novel is generated by Erdrich’s tenderness for her characters…magnificent…a brilliantly imagined and constructed saga of empathy, elegy, spirituality, resilience, wit, wonder, and hope that will stand as a defining master work of American literature for generations to come.
Booklist


(Starred review.) After accidentally shooting his friend and neighbor's young son, a man on a Native American reservation subscribes to "an old form of justice" by giving his own son, LaRose, to the parents of his victim.... [A] meditative, profoundly humane story... this novel is...about the emotions men need, but rarely get, from one another.
Kirkus Reviews