In This Edition of
The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published December 4, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
Contents
Highlighting indicates debut books
Discussions are open to all members to read and post. Click to view the books currently being discussed.
Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Essays
Poetry & Novels in Verse
Mysteries
Thrillers
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Biography/Memoir
History, Current Affairs and Religion
True Crime
Travel & Adventure
Literary Fiction
Historical Fiction
Mysteries
Thrillers
Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Graphic Novels
History, Current Affairs and Religion
Science, Health and the Environment
| BookBrowse: | |
| Critics: | |
| Readers: |
In this stunning novel, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author Louise Erdrich tells a story of love, natural forces, spiritual yearnings, and the tragic impact of uncontrollable circumstances on ordinary people's lives.
History is a flood. The mighty red ...
In Argus, North Dakota, a collection of people revolve around a fraught wedding.
Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms, is desperate to marry Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth who can't read her future but seems to resolve his.
Hugo, a gentle red-haired, home-schooled giant, is also in love with Kismet. He's determined to steal her and is eager to be a home wrecker.
Kismet's mother, Crystal, hauls sugar beets for Gary's family, and on her nightly runs, tunes into the darkness of late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries for the future, her daughter's and her own.
Human time, deep time, Red River time, the half-life of herbicides and pesticides, and the elegance of time represented in fracking core samples from unimaginable depths, is set against the speed of climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the sudden economic meltdown of 2008-2009. How much does a dress cost? A used car? A package of cinnamon rolls? Can you see the shape of your soul in the everchanging clouds? Your personal salvation in the giant expanse of sky? These are the questions the people of the Red River Valley of the North wrestle with every day.
The Mighty Red is a novel of tender humor, disturbance, and hallucinatory mourning. It is about on-the-job pains and immeasurable satisfactions, a turbulent landscape, and eating the native weeds growing in your backyard. It is about ordinary people who dream, grow up, fall in love, struggle, endure tragedy, carry bitter secrets; men and women both complicated and contradictory, flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful. It is about a starkly beautiful prairie community whose members must cope with devastating consequences as powerful forces upend them. As with every book this great modern master writes, The Mighty Red is about our tattered bond with the earth, and about love in all of its absurdity and splendor.
A new novel by Louise Erdrich is a major literary event; gorgeous and heartrending, The Mighty Red is a triumph.
Excerpted from The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. Copyright © 2024 by Louise Erdrich. Excerpted by permission of Harper. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Permit me to break the fourth wall. Like any good reviewer, I aim to analyze a book dispassionately, on its own terms. But personally, the true sign of a powerful work of fiction is if I dream about it—if I find myself in a character's shoes, feeling all the dread or confusion or exhilaration that they felt.
And that is exactly what happened with The Mighty Red, Louise Erdrich's latest novel. The action built slowly—Erdrich's specialty—until one night I awoke sweating and grasping for consciousness to escape the book's suffocatingly small town and its desperate personalities. This is a fundamentally human story, suffused with elements of the supernatural, resulting in something both relatable and fantastical—and moving enough to influence your subconsciousness.
The Mighty Red takes place from 2008 through the early 2010s, with the Great Recession as a backdrop and the rural Red River Valley in North Dakota as its setting. Casual high school lovers Kismet Poe and Gary Geist stumble into an ill-advised marriage immediately after graduation. Kismet is actually in love with someone else and isn't ready to commit to either man, but a family crisis and Gary's overwhelming desperation push her into the marriage.
She quickly realizes that she's become the supposed savior and linchpin of a family torn apart by a horrible tragedy that was in many ways Gary's fault. Not only does Kismet have no desire to play this role, but it's obvious that no one person can wipe away the trauma the way she wipes away months' worth of filth in her in-laws' neglected house. Practically held hostage by the family, Kismet begins to realize what she wants and what she truly values. The slow burn of her captivity with the Geists—and her making the best of it through cleaning, gardening, and learning the truth about the terrible accident that changed them—builds expertly and keeps the reader entranced.
Meanwhile, other narrative threads and perspectives are interwoven with Kismet's story. Kismet's wayward father is on a crime spree, robbing the town church's fundraising haul and a string of banks; left to clean up the mess, Kismet's mother tries to fend off foreclosure, bankruptcy, and the townspeople's suspicions that she's in on all of it. Kismet's true love, Hugo, heads to the oil fields and returns as a man with a career and a nest egg. The landscape surrounding everyone becomes increasingly barren, as pesticides on the Geists' farm kill all insects, birds, and wildlife, resulting in an arms race between herbicide-resistant weeds and ever-more-powerful chemicals (see Beyond the Book), and families throughout the town struggle to survive and adapt to this new reality.
Erdrich expertly switches between characters' perspectives and pulls the reader into their inner lives; the effect is never disorienting, but rather provides a 360-degree view of this insular community and its lightly magical realist world.
As the tension builds, the reader waits on edge of her seat for the characters to finally face their traumas, whether by confronting what happened the night of the tragedy or by reflecting on even earlier misfortunes and mistakes that led them to their current lives. As we watch their stories unfold, the Red River silently looms in the background as a source of pain, a recipient of pesticides, a regional water supply, and a purifying force all at once.
The Mighty Red bears many resemblances to Erdrich's earlier novels; scenes of overnight shifts in grueling workplace conditions are reminiscent of The Night Watchman, and the depressed, depopulated parts of North Dakota are familiar territory for her. But this story progresses with a momentum all its own. It is an intimate study of characters, with a dash of the thriller genre in the crime spree storyline—it frightens and excites, but never overly so. Above all, the novel explores what happens to individuals, families, and communities when trauma is buried, and what happens when it inevitably resurfaces.
Reviewed by Rose Rankin
Rated 4 out of 5
by Fiesty Techie
A Heartfelt Journey Through Love and Resilience in The Mighty Red
Louise Erdrich's The Mighty Red is a poignant exploration of love, loss, and the complexities of rural life in North Dakota. Set against the backdrop of the 2008 financial crisis, the novel intricately weaves together the lives of its characters—particularly focusing on Kismet Poe, a young woman caught in a love triangle with two very different men. Critics have lauded Erdrich's ability to blend humor with profound emotional depth, showcasing her poetic prose that captures the stark beauty of the prairie landscape and the struggles of its inhabitants. The narrative unfolds slowly, allowing readers to become deeply invested in the characters' journeys as they confront their pasts and navigate their intertwined fates. Overall, The Mighty Red is celebrated for its rich storytelling and vivid characterizations, marking it as another significant addition to Erdrich's esteemed body of work.
In Louise Erdrich's novel The Mighty Red, a rural community in North Dakota grapples with common problems facing agricultural centers—the bankruptcy of small farms and resulting consolidation into mega-farms; job loss and depopulation; and increasingly brittle economies and ecosystems damaged by monoculture.
In Erdrich's story, the monoculture crop is sugar beets, one of the most nutrient-poor crops on the market. The largest farm in town has also moved to genetically modified Roundup Ready seeds, meaning their crops can be doused repeatedly with Roundup, Monsanto's trade name for the herbicide glyphosate. Roundup is supposed to kill the weeds competing with the beets; the problem is that the chemicals kill all other insect and animal life and turn the soil into a barren wasteland—dirt so empty of nutrients and structure that, in a memorable scene in the novel, it can't even absorb a few drops of beer. The desertification of the landscape they rely on is a metaphor for the characters' self-defeating choices. But it also reveals a critical real-world issue: that Roundup-resistant crops contribute to ecological and health damages.
Glyphosate was introduced in 1974, and since then researchers have found mounting evidence that it causes cancer and has toxic effects on the nervous system. Despite the EPA's determination in 2020 that it poses no risks of concern to human health, studies have concluded that "Glyphosate disrupts the endocrine system and the balance of gut bacteria, it damages DNA and is a driver of mutations that lead to cancer." There are currently thousands of lawsuits over glyphosate and cancer working their way through the courts, with varying outcomes in favor of Monsanto or plaintiffs.
By planting Roundup Ready seeds, farmers are encouraged to apply ever-increasing amounts of Roundup to their fields, which is then absorbed by soils, waterways, and organisms. As with all herbicides, weeds develop resistance to repeated applications over time, reducing the effectiveness of the chemical while continuing to deplete soils and damage living organisms. In The Mighty Red, the weed lambsquarters develops resistance to Roundup and continues to flummox farmers. In real-world studies in Iowa, it's waterhemp. Across the Midwest, Purdue University researchers have found that giant ragweed has become resistant.
Alternatively, there are methods of integrated pest management that use biology and natural predation to keep weeds or insects in check. In addition to reducing the use of harmful chemicals, these methods break the evolutionary cycle of weeds developing chemical resistance. In The Mighty Red, for example, leafy spurge beetles are used to control the weeds they're named for. As one character muses, the beetles "controlled the weeds but never quite ate all of the spurge, never ate themselves entirely out of existence. They weren't like people. They respected their existential limits."
An image of a man spraying pesticides on a farm, courtesy of the Center for Food Safety.
Filed under Nature and the Environment
By Rose Rankin
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
