Welcome to Litsy!

Adored this and would put it right up there with the (many) other Erdrich books I've loved. Totally invested in the characters, loved the setting (time and place), and her writing just works for me every time.
This would absolutely have made my #AuldLangSpine list had I not finished it the day after filling out the form, @monalyisha !!

3.5⭐️ I thought it was a decent story. Felt kinda blah. #literary #2024 #indigenious #fiction #contemporary +5pts

The Mighty Red begins in 2008 and follows a young woman named Kismet and her mother, Crystal. Crystal works the night shift, driving a truck for a sugar beet farm and Kismet has graduated from high school. Two young men, Gary and Hugo, are both in love with Kismet; she decides to marry Gary against her own better judgment. She and her mother are also caught up in a scandal when her father skips town, appearing to have stolen the church fund.

I love Erdrich‘s well drawn characters so I‘m excited to start her newest about sugar beet farming in South Dakota.

4.5⭐️/5⭐️

My 90th book... which was my goal to read this year! Great book to end it on!

I could feel the insular small rural community on every page of this book when the rest of the world seems so far away and you marry someone because, well, they asked.

I was underwhelmed by Erdrich‘s recent novel but I enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more a few days after finishing it. The teenage small town characters who love each other and hold out hope they can eventually be together, a husband who absconds with the town church‘s money, the tragedies large and small that affect the residents, and the land, always the land in an Erdrich story, offer a story that ultimately is quite rich.

I‘ve seen a lot of division over Erdrich‘s latest where a good portion of the disappointed seem to be established Erdrich fans. Which I find interesting.

Erdrich isn‘t stepping out of her comfort zone here; she‘s been doing this long enough. And really I don‘t feel she needs to. She does what she does, and she does it well.

Most complaints tend to be about not connecting with the characters. What if we look at it as The Mighty Red as narrator?

I love Louise Erdrich so it pains me to say that I did not love this book. There are some important points in here about farming and the environment but it all gets buried in a clunky plot about the lives of people in one small town including a tragedy in its past, the ill advised marriage of recent high school graduates and a string of bank robberies. The characters don‘t have Erdrich‘s usual magic so it was harder to understand their choices.

Erdrich‘s latest is excellent, as you might suspect! This book focuses in on a small farming community in ND and two recent high school grads in particular, while hinting at some recent tragic and difficult events. The tone and humor in this one remind me very much of The Sentence, so I suspect other readers are likely to be as happy as I!

So excited to get my hands on this book in time for my two camping weekends in a row! I've only managed to read one physical book and one audiobook this year so I'm looking forward to changing that.

So excited to learn that we‘re getting a new novel from Louise this October!