The Beet Queen: A Novel by Louise ErdrichMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
What can I say, Erdrich is a magician. Her novels you can not only sink your teeth into, but bury your nose in, sink up to your ankles in, and wallow completely in.
Erdrich is masterful at the point-of-view chapters that alternate between characters. Her characters are so totally flawed, despicable, hateful even, but sympathetic their own pitiful ways. Their self-criticism makes them all the more appealing. While they are only human, they participate in otherworldly events that make The Beet Queen's world inhabit a universe uncannily parallel but not identical to our own.
Where grandmother and granddaughter both fly off with the cropduster, dreaming of fame and fortune. Where a baby is born in a blizzard and named after her deliverer. Where a boy with shattered feet rides atop a wagon pulled along railroad tracks by a silent Indian. Where a dead woman wearing a garnet necklace sits in a butcher's truck with the air conditioning on full blast while her friends attend the fair.
You have to laugh sometimes at the absurd situations Erdrich creates. They're just too bizarre. But isn't that what fiction is all about?
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I was sure I had read this, but none of the aburdities sounded familiar. I wonder if I confused it with some of the Erdrich I have read and The Bee Season and The Queen of Bees and similarly named books I did read.
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