Summary and Reviews of The Master Butchers Singing Club by Louise Erdrich

Media Reviews

BookPage Grand and generous fiction… Erdrich's most sweeping and ambitious yet.

Entertainment Weekly Appropriately grim and thoughtful, The Master Butchers Singing Club is also full of tenderness and life … Marvelous.

Miami Herald [C]an surely be cast as the most wrenching and wise of Erdrich's nine novels.

Minneapolis Star Tribune Erdrich's new novel is a master work.

O magazine A substantial, beautifully composed, confident work of art … both expansive in its reach and intimate in its intense focus.

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette [A] masterpiece… Erdrich never hits a false note.

San Francisco Chronicle Each moment and its particulars dazzles … Fidelis and firm-bellied Delphine and the rest [of the characters] are masterworks.

USA Today - Bob Minzesheimer Not since Richard Russo’s 2001 novel Empire Falls... have I enjoyed the company of such memorable characters.

Atlantic Monthly Satisfying and life-affirming.

Booklist - Joanne Wilkinson In mesmerizing prose, Erdrich meticulously re-creates the brutal work of the slaughterhouse and the lithe grace of the circus troupe and then counterpoints this physical world with transcendent moments of human connection. It's clear that Erdrich, one of our finest writers, is working at the very peak of her considerable powers.

Kirkus Reviews The tensions between stoical endurance and the frailty of human connection, as delineated in Erdrich's almost unimaginably rich eighth novel a panoramic exploration of a world where butchers sing like angels. ... There are echoes of Steinbeck's East of Eden as well, in a thoughtful, artful, painfully moving addition to an ongoing American saga.

Publishers Weekly All of the virtues of Erdrich's best works - her lyrical precision, bleakly beautiful North Dakota settings, deft interweaving of characters and subplots, and haunting evocation of love and its attendant mysteries-are on full display in this superb novel....With its lush prose, jolts of wisdom and historical sweep, this story is as rich and resonant as any Erdrich has told.

Library Journal - Starr E. Smith Drawing on her German and Ojibwe heritage, Erdrich here offers another stimulating exploration into the human heart that will appeal to old fans and new readers alike. It's not exactly a breakaway, but more of the same from such a good writer is just fine.

The New York Times - Michiko Katutani The novel is more naturalistic and more conventional that the author's earlier Argus stories -- fewer excursions into magical realism, fewer flights of fancy -- but every bit as emotionally resonant. Through the prism of one family's tangled history, Ms. Erdrich gives us an indelible glimpse of the American dream and the disappointments that can gather in its wake.