From the Publisher
"[Erdrich is] a master, a legend at building stories around community....This is a book about family and community. It is a book about upward mobility and finding our true passions. You will love Kismet." — Jenna Bush Hager, Today/The Read with Jenna Book Club
"In the hands of this master storyteller, everything is effortlessly connected. . . . Fearlessly depicting the toughest losses and darkest threats, Erdrich always finds hope." — Oprah Daily
"[A] heart-wrenching story of how human lives are susceptible to nature's impact." — People
"[In] The Mighty Red, humor and sorrow are fused together like twined tree trunks that keep each other standing.... Erdrich is so good at romantic comedy, with her special blend of Austen sense and Ojibwe sensibility. As the funny scenes flow one after another, you may not even notice the stray drops of blood scattered along the novel's margins.... As usual when closing a book by Louise Erdrich, I'm left wondering, how can a novel be so funny and so moving? How can life?" — Washington Post
"Erdrich should be a major contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and her new novel, The Mighty Red, only strengthens that case... [T]he book is deliciously strange, entirely captivating, another outright triumph. Daffiness mingles with brutality, high comedy with wrenching tragedy.... [B]y turns heartrending and hilarious, righteously angry and expansively numinous... [S]imultaneously dramatizes a hideous history of exploitation and degradation and offers hope....That Erdrich does all of this with such apparent ease, grace, and joy is a testament to her surpassing greatness and a glorious gift to her readers." — Boston Globe
"[A]n immersive domestic drama....that, like much of Erdrich's oeuvre, speaks to the acrimony at the heart of the American national project." — New York Times
"[A] poignant novel of place.... [S]weetness blends indissolubly with tragedy." — Wall Street Journal
“[A] deft, almost winsome novel. . . . Erdrich’s writing feels both effortless and wise. . . . In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.” — Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. . . . Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"While the novel touches on tragedy, it also includes scenes of sheer comedic delight. No one describes a book-group meeting better than Erdrich. Pulitzer Price and National Book Award winner Erdrich (The Sentence) yet again displays her storytelling skills." — Library Journal (starred review)
"[A] finely woven tale of anguish and desire, crimes and healing. With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich’s latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations." — Booklist
"A new novel from Louise Erdrich....is always a literary event, and her latest continues one of American literature's most remarkable winning streaks[, ] touching on everything from the climate crisis to the way in which familial dynasties visit their failings and foibles on each generation." — The Guardian
"A new novel from Louise Erdrich—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, if you didn’t know—is always something to celebrate... Start clearing off space on your bedside table now." — Literary Hub
"[A]n enthralling ode and elegy to the people of North Dakota's Red River Valley.... Erdrich is at her best... .There is an amiable, inventive quality to all of Erdrich's 19 novels that in part explains how it is possible to be hugely entertained while learning why farmers require increasingly powerful pesticides or what our collective sweet tooth is costing the planet.... Erdrich calls on us to heal our frayed bond with the earth, and to regard it, as she does, with wonder." — Los Angeles Times
"[A]s good a novel as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Erdrich has written and, as most will agree, that's saying a lot." — Minneapolis Star Tribune
"Erdrich's writing is as hilarious as it is heart-wrenching, as focus on the minutiae of insular community as it is on encompassing concerns like our stewardship of the earth." — Seattle Times
"[A] captivating multigenerational tale set amid the 2008 financial crisis." — Time
"The Mighty Red might just be a new American classic." — Bookpage
"[A] sweeping, tender-hearted epic about ordinary people who have no option but to forge ahead in the face of tragedy." — Harper's Bazaar
"Erdrich is back with another brilliant, funny, profound story of people and place, earth and spirit." — Newsday
"[A]nother must-read from the acclaimed author...a moving story of mothers and daughters set amid the economic collapse and the devastating impacts of industrial farming." — Town & Country
"[A] rich saga." — Vanity Fair
"This powerful story conjures the tumultuousness of the modern world. It's the kind of book that makes you go, 'Yes! This is why I read!'" — Real Simple
"A beautifully achieved story of ordinary lives shaped by love, work and landscape." — Sainsbury's Magazine
"Erdrich's prose is lovely.... There's lots more here about love and loss and the things people do when they experience the highs and lows of both.... [W]hen we finally get the truth, it's a powerful moment, and one that sets the scene for, if not forgiveness, some measure of peace." — Associated Press
"It's a singular pleasure to read a novel that begins with the everyday struggles of ordinary people and steadily builds into something larger, linking the quotidian with the profound. That is the potent splendor contained in Louise Erdrich's works, and it continues with her latest novel, The Mighty Red.... [T]his is a generous-hearted tale of competing loves, wistful regrets and second chances.... [A]t once a tender coming-of-age story and a wise tale of older love." — WBUR
"In her first novel since The Sentence, Erdrich displays all her writing talents.... [The Mighty Red] is tender-hearted, often funny and sometimes dark.... Describing the plot of The Mighty Red can't capture Erdrich's poetic writing about hopes, dreams, hallucinations, fears and tragedy." — St. Paul Pioneer Press
"The way Erdrich's characters look at and deal with the world remains as grounded and enchanting as ever. She is a treasure." — Daily Kos
"Absorbing." — AARP
"A novel set in a small prairie community in Argus, North Dakota that somehow also captures the world." — Parade
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-07-04
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction.
This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissectsEat Pray Love andThe Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance.
In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world.
