MAY 2016 - AudioFile
Having accidentally killed his neighbors’ young son, a man offers in exchange his own boy, LaRose. This ancient act of tribal justice entwines these already tragically connected families in unanticipated ways. The Ravich and Iron families are clearly as alive to Erdrich as the ghosts with whom the mystical LaRose communes. As narrator, Erdrich inhabits them—dark, light, comic, confused—with apparent effortlessness. She delivers with equal ease mythic stories, slapstick nursing home exchanges, teen angst, and all-consuming grief. She even gives a rousing volleyball play-by-play with significance well beyond the game on the court. To keep the emotions she, as author, has created, Erdrich, as narrator, digs deep. LAROSE is a winning story that will leave listeners cheering. K.W. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Booklist (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.
Real Simple
A stunning novel…A heartbreaking tale of love, family, and obligation that spans generations.
The Twin Cities Pioneer Press
Electrifying...Louise Erdrich’s...most brilliant novel.
Entertainment Weekly
A fiercely resonant exploration of love, loss, and the tangled ties that bind.
Buzzfeed
Louise Erdrich’s latest novel LAROSE is, as usual, a gift to treasure… Erdrich writes about reconnection and reconciliation with such purity and precision, she’ll crack your heart right open, then mend it with care and leave your whole soul singing with joy.
The Columbus Dispatch
In someone else’s hands, this might turn out to be a stark morality tale or a pure tearjerker. In Louise Erdrich’s, it’s something else altogether… a novel more generous and less predictable than might be expected, where revenge and human planning in general take second place to life working itself out in ways that no one human can predict or control.
Bookreporter.com
A complex tapestry of retribution and acceptance…Ever the master of emotions, Erdrich…incorporates elements of guilt, justice and atonement.
Chapter 16
Mesmerizing… Throughout her body of work, Erdrich has woven complex narratives with rich character detail and the cultural traditions of her Native American background. In LaRose, her greatest strengths are on display as all these strands come together under her masterful control.
O: the Oprah Magazine
…a brutal, ultimately buoyant dramatization of the way unexpected kinships heal us.
Houston Chronicle
A powerful evocation of two families’ struggle to overcome misfortune..
Providence Journal
Erdrich’s created an entire world, a realm bristling with a sense of place, where plots unwind and surprise, the spirit world suffuses everyday existence, and the past is as much a part of the present as breathing…magnificent…It is Erdrich at the top of her form.
Kansas City Star
Told with aching understanding…This timeless 15th novel stands as one of Erdrich’s best: comprehending and comprehensive, full of cascading, resonant details punctuated with spiky humor.
Denver Post
Breathtaking…[LaRose] may be her most graceful creation…The recurring miracle of Erdrich’s fiction is that nothing feels miraculous in her novels. She gently insists 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.
People
Erdrich’s richly layered tale brings a host of fascinating characters to life as it builds to its haunting resolution.
Miami Herald
…[a] superb new novel…[Erdrich immerses] us in this remarkable world so thoroughly, so satisfyingly…
Minneapolis Star 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.
Philip Roth
[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.
Chicago Tribune
[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.
Vanity Fair
...a magnificent, sorrowful tale of justice, retribution, and love.
New York Times Book Review
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.
Boston Globe
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.
San Francisco Chronicle
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.
Los Angeles Times
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...
Washington Post
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.
the Oprah Magazine O
…a brutal, ultimately buoyant dramatization of the way unexpected kinships heal us.
Library Journal
12/01/2015
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. Landreaux Iron is deer hunting when he inadvertently shoots and kills five-year-old Dusty Ravich, son of best friend Pete Ravich and his own son LaRose's favorite buddy. To make amends, the grief-stricken Landreaux falls back on a traditional means of retribution, giving LaRose to Pete and his wife. With a 200,000-copy first printing.