Louise Erdrich has written some fantastic books but also some that I didn’t like as well. Still, she is usually a good choice for something thoughtful and insightful. However, with this novel I had to have patience for the first hundred pages as it centered on a teenage love triangle, something I had zero interest in.
It’s 2008. Kismet Poe is an eighteen-year-old part-Ojibwe girl living in a farming community in North Dakota in the valley of the Red River of the North. Her mother, Crystal, is hard working and frugal, and Kismet is working as a waiter in a restaurant. Both of them are careful with money to make up for the extravagance of Martin, Kismet’s father, who brings in little money working in theater and spends most of it on expensive clothing and extravagances.
During the last year, Gary Geist, the son of Crystal’s well-off boss, has changed from making fun of Kismet to deciding he’s in love with her. They are sort of dating. Even though he was a big high-school football player and extremely popular and she was considered a geek, he’s decided he has to marry her. I found this courtship, in which he continually tries to wear her down, so wrong, especially because Gary bores Kismet.
In fact, Kismet prefers and is having sex with Hugo, whom she finds soft and comforting. But Hugo is just a kid at 16. Gary has his reasons for wanting to marry Kismet, and his mother Winnie does, too, and he finally manages to wear her down enough to sort of say yes. Then, as Winnie takes over the wedding completely, Kismet can’t find a way to get out of it.
Crystal knows she shouldn’t let Kismet marry Gary, but she’s having her own issues besides being totally exhausted. Martin has been handling the church renovation fund and doing well. But in 2008 there’s the huge downturn and the church fund starts losing money. Then Martin disappears, and Crystal learns that her house—her own house, which has been paid off—now has a mortgage fraudulently obtained and the church fund is gone.
Surrounding all of what’s going on is something that is not being discussed but has to do with an accident the year before, in which two of Gary’s posse were killed.
The book got more interesting after the wedding, but I never really was that involved with the characters. And frankly, I didn’t like either of Kismet’s love interests that much. I liked Gary’s friend Eric, who also cares about Kismet, a lot better.
The novel has themes about the treatment of the environment and the damage modern farming techniques have done to the soil. Hugo goes to work for oil frackers at one point and sees the countryside being turned into a moonscape.
I think maybe there was too much going on in this book, too many characters, too many themes, too many directions, to have it really grab me. And some of the revelations that come out at the very end of the book would have involved me more if I’d learned about them earlier.
What? Me Read? 