Book
Review- LaRose by Louise Erdrich
Reviewed by Christine Miskonoodinkwe Smith
LaRose is a
fiction novel that grabs you from the first page and from thereon it is hard to
put down. The main character Landreaux Irons is hunting on the borders of his
land in the late summer of 1999 in North Dakota, when he takes a shot at what
he thinks is a young buck. It is a shot that forever alters his family’s life
and the lives of his neighbors-the half -sister of his wife Emmaline- Nola and
her husband Peter Ravich. It is not a young buck he has shot at, but it is
five-year-old Dusty Ravich he has shot who happened to have been walking
through the forest at the time of the shooting.
When Landreaux
finds out that he has shot Dusty, he is devastated and it takes everything in
him to not relapse into the bottle again. Dusty was a friend of Landreaux’s
five-year-old son La Rose, and the two families have always been close. The
shooting draws a rift between the two families leaving you wondering if things
will ever be the same between them again. You ask yourself, how can you
possibly overcome the loss of a young child especially when it’s at the hands
of a close family friend. Following an old Ojibwe tradition of retribution,
Landreaux and Emmaline hand over their youngest boy-LaRose to their friends and
say, “Our son will be your son now.”
Within this gesture of retribution, the reader is taken into
what these two families endure after the inexplicable loss of Dusty. LaRose,
who was also Dusty’s best friend, has a lot put on his shoulders for a
five-year-old, but he is considered an old soul with the ability to keep the
calm between the Raviche’s and his own family. He becomes absorbed into his new
family but then must get used to being shuffled between the two families to
appease the two-family’s grief. He bears witness to the pain that his father’s
accident puts on both families. Nola is so lost in her grief that she almost
commits suicide, only to be found by her daughter Maggie, and Peter gets lost
in preparing for potential environmental disaster that he assumes will come
with the new year 2000.
As the years pass, LaRose plays a pivotal role in keeping a
tenuous peace between his two families and their mutual pain slowly starts to
heal. It is only when a vengeful man from Landreaux’s residential school days
begins raising trouble that this peace begins to become threatened once more.
LaRose written
by Louise Erdrich is a powerful book that explores loss, justice and reparation.
It is intriguing and well worth the read. La Rose was the winner of the
National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and published in 2016 by Harper
Perennial. ISBN: 978-0-06-227703-9
