![]() We even visit the spirit realm on our journey through LaRose.įor a writer to be heralded as the voice of something – a generation or a nation or a gender – critics have to feel that the books transcend their specificity to speak of something universal. In the present tense, the repercussions of the young boy’s death are felt throughout the community, despite the town’s powerful struggles with poverty, ill health and despair. Never a minimalist, she expands her focus to include a family ancestor, a girl also named LaRose, sold by her mother for booze and tobacco to a man who raped and abused her. ![]() This being Erdrich, the canvas is larger than just one generation of two families brought together through tragedy. ![]() ![]() As a way of making reparations, Landreaux and his wife Emmaline decide to follow an old Native American custom of atonement and offer their own five-year-old son, LaRose, to the parents of the dead child, to help make the broken family whole. The unseen boy, whose hair was the same colour as the late autumnal fields, came between the hunter and the deer. ![]() The story is both simple and incredibly complex: while out hunting, an Ojibwe man, Landreaux Iron, accidentally shoots and kills his wife’s half-sister’s five-year-old son, Dusty. It is heartbreaking it is nuanced the prose is as strong and stark as the wintry western landscape it describes. ![]()
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