Weekly Words About New Books in

Independent Bookstores

September 29, 2024

New Novel About a Prairie Community Struggling Against a Nationwide Economic Meltdown, and a Probing Examination of the Power of Stories to Distort Reality and Encourage Injustice

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich. The award-winning Native American author who won a Pulitzer Prize for The Night Watchman is back with what feels like another classic tale. An offbeat teenage love triangle and a mother/daughter bond are two of the ingredients that make Erdrich's new novel such a winning mix. It's set along the Red River Valley of North Dakota in the small town of Argus in 2008 at time when the country is in the midst of an economic meltdown. As one would expect from Erdrich, the story features wonderfully ordinary people who are flawed and decent, lonely and hopeful - a prairie community trying to get by as financial and environmental forces seek to wreak havoc on their everyday lives.

Among the main characters are Gary Geist, a terrified young man set to inherit two farms; Kismet Poe, an impulsive, lapsed Goth whom Gary is desperate to marry; and Hugo, a gentle, home-schooled giant who is also in love with Kismet and determined to woo her away. And there is Kismet's mother, Crystal, who hauls sugar beets for Gary's family and who, on her nightly runs, listens to late-night radio, sees visions of guardian angels, and worries about her and her daughter's future.

In its review, Booklist described The Mighty Red as a "finely woven tale of anguish and desire, crimes and healing. With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich's latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations."

The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. The author of the bestselling Between the World and Me returns with a revelatory look at oppression and how the stories being told about a place and a people don't always reflect the realities of actual life. In intertwined essays, Coates writes of three separate journeys he took - the first to Dakar, Senegal; the second to Chapin, South Carolina, just outside the state's capital city of Columbia; and the third to Palestine. On all of the trips, he discovers that what he knows from storytelling about the respective areas does not nearly tell the entire story. In Senegal's capital, he finds a vibrant, modern city - and visits slave castles off the coast, surrounded by the ocean that carried his ancestors away in chains. In South Carolina, he meets a teacher whose job is in jeopardy for teaching one of Coates's own books, along with a group of largely White supporters who were motivated by 2020's summer of racial reckoning. He also explores the backlash to the reckoning and deeper myths and stories of a city whose elaborate State House acreage is infested (my word) with statues of segregationists.

Coates' longest essay deals with his travels to Palestine, where he sees - with what for him is devastating clarity - how easily we are misled by nationalist narratives, and the tragedy that lies in the clash between the stories we tell and the reality of life on the ground. He writes candidly about the "glare of racism" he felt in Israel, and describes life-changing sojourns into Jerusalem, the heart of Zionist mythology, and to the occupied territories, where he sees the reality the myth is meant to hide.

In its starred review, Booklist wrote,"Coates exhorts readers, including students, parents, educators, and journalists, to challenge conventional narratives that can be used to justify ethnic cleansing or camouflage racist policing. Brilliant and timely."