![]() ![]() Admittedly, the eponymous agricultural monarch - a girl named Dot Adare - is one-quarter Chippewa yet the most interesting part of her family is not the Kashpaws, but the crazy white Adares. ![]() And whereas Love Medicine derived a great deal of its originality (and also, one fears, a portion of its critical success) from the fact that it chronicled the previously unexamined lives of American Indians, The Beet Queen uses the Chippewa stories only as it uses everything else - as supporting material in the creation of fascinating personalities. But The Beet Queen has a much tighter, firmer construction than its predecessor: it meanders less, moving decisively toward its chosen endpoint, with each scene carefully woven into the whole pattern. Like the first novel, this one is set in the Dakotas, and Chippewa Indians again form part of the cast. Like Love Medicine - which won awards from the National Book Critics Circle, The Los Angeles Times, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters - The Beet Queen is composed of a series of narratives representing the perspectives of the various characters (one of whom, Eli Kashpaw, appears in both novels). Moreover, the ways in which it is better, building as they do on the virtues of her first novel, give great promise for Erdrich's future accomplishments as a fiction writer. ![]() ADMIRERS OF Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine will be pleased to discover that her new novel, The Beet Queen, is even better. ![]()
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