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The Crown of Columbus
A pregnant anthropologist and her lover, a scholar and poet who is her opposite, journey to the Caribbean after she finds Columbus's lost diary and a reference to "the greatest treasure of Europe"
382 pages, Hardcover
Published January 1, 1991
14 people are currently reading
709 people want to read
About the author
Michael Dorris
38 books87 followersMichael Dorris was a novelist, short story writer, nonfiction writer, and author of books for children
The first member of his family to attend college, Dorris graduated from Georgetown with honors in English and received his graduate degree in anthropology from Yale. Dorris worked as a professor of English and anthropology at Dartmouth College.
Dorris was part-Native American through the lineage of his paternal. He founded the Native American Studies department at Dartmouth in 1972 and chaired it until 1985.
In 1971, Dorris became the first unmarried man in the United States to adopt a child. His adopted son, Reynold Abel, was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and his condition became the subject of Dorris' The Broken Cord,(the pseudonym "Adam" is used for his son in the book).
In 1981, Dorris married aspiring writer Louise Erdrich. Throughout their relationship, Erdrich and Dorris edited and contributed to each other's writing.
In 1991, Dorris' adopted son, Reynold Abel, died after being hit by a car. In 1996, Louise Erdrich separated from Dorris. On April 10, 1997, Dorris committed suicide in Concord, New Hampshire.
The first member of his family to attend college, Dorris graduated from Georgetown with honors in English and received his graduate degree in anthropology from Yale. Dorris worked as a professor of English and anthropology at Dartmouth College.
Dorris was part-Native American through the lineage of his paternal. He founded the Native American Studies department at Dartmouth in 1972 and chaired it until 1985.
In 1971, Dorris became the first unmarried man in the United States to adopt a child. His adopted son, Reynold Abel, was diagnosed with fetal alcohol syndrome and his condition became the subject of Dorris' The Broken Cord,(the pseudonym "Adam" is used for his son in the book).
In 1981, Dorris married aspiring writer Louise Erdrich. Throughout their relationship, Erdrich and Dorris edited and contributed to each other's writing.
In 1991, Dorris' adopted son, Reynold Abel, died after being hit by a car. In 1996, Louise Erdrich separated from Dorris. On April 10, 1997, Dorris committed suicide in Concord, New Hampshire.
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January 13, 2010
The Crown of Columbus was written by Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, a husband and wife team of authors with Native American roots... sort of... well, more on that later. Both Erdrich and Dorris are individually noted for their own accomplishments (Erdrich mostly for her novels, Dorris for his poetry as well as his nonfiction activism), but they frequently collaborated. They wrote together under the pseudonym Milou North, though The Crown of Columbus is the only novel where they publish using their individual names. It's impossible to not speculate on how they wrote this book, as it is told from a variety of perspectives, particularly weighted towards that of the two main characters: Vivian Twostar and Roger Williams. As a result of this, I immediately pictured Erdrich and Dorris as writing about themselves in slightly adjusted terms... two intelligent and passionate academics at Dartmouth who think quite highly of themselves and each other.
Louise Erdrich-- I mean Vivian Twostar is an untenured professor at Dartmouth College, heading up the Native American Studies department and clashing regularly with the administration, who might be less hesitant in their dismissal of her as an unconventional professor if it weren't for the fact that it would look bad to let go of the only Native American on staff. As a bit of a peace offering (no pun intended... well... not much of one) and to add to her meager list of published work (which might help her bid for tenure and secure some stability to her existence), she has agreed to write and publish an article on Columbus for the approaching quincentennial celebrations. Naturally, the college administration would hope for a Native American perspective, to which Vivian responds, "I told them to advertise on reservations for a series of 'Discover Spain' tours. Twenty-eight days, flamenco included. I said the government should erect a huge neon sign near Samana Cay that flashed morning, noon and night: 'Wrong Way to Calcutta.'" Clearly, Vivian marches to her own drummer, refusing to submit to stereotypes from any of the number of people who lay claim to her. She has a teenage son named Nash, whose father has long since left to start his "real family" out in California, and they share their home with Vivian's Grandmother, who raised young Vivian after her own mother left. Being left seems to be a theme in Vivian's life, so when she finds herself pregnant with the baby of fellow professor Roger Williams, she preemptively ends things with him, explaining that she knows he'll be frustrated, be disappointed, and abandon them soon enough, so they might as well end things now.
More about Michael Dorri-- ahem. Roger Williams. In most reviews of this book that I've read, they cite Roger as being everything Vivian is not. Well, this is true, except they're both intelligent professors working on pieces that have to do with Columbus while living in Hanover, New Hampshire, so let's keep it in perspective. They approach life from different perspectives. A very white poet and English professor with a stereotypically wealthy WASP family, Roger lives the life of a bachelor with means. A creature of habit, he has a very specific routine and keeps a clean home, without clutter and without much complication. For some time now, he has been working on an epic poem about Columbus entitled "Diary of a Lost Man." Vivian completely disrupts his life, from even the first moment of their meeting. They quickly become lovers, enjoying their secret liaison until Vivian announces her pregnancy and, therefore, the end of their affair. It is Vivian who puts an end to things, but Roger does not follow her or demand to be part of her life. She has read him right in the sense that her family and their baby would entirely upend his existence but the question then becomes whether he wants to adjust and find value in this new life (or really, if he's even capable of doing so).
Vivian falls asleep in the library one day, to awake around midnight and find that she's been locked in. Heavily pregnant, experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions, and worried about her somewhat troublesome teenage son, Vivian deals with her situation by continuing to research Columbus (um, because aren't we all this rational?). She stumbles across letters from the Cobb family, a Dartmouth dynasty that, according to these letters, seem to emphasize a family trait of feeling that the college has stolen something from them by misplacing a gift from one of their ancestors. During the course of that same night of Vivian's library imprisonment, Roger had a somewhat different encounter with an angry relative. He enters his home with the distinct feeling that a person who lives alone can have when they feel that someone else has been there. His fear is confirmed when he finds his personal diary missing (a diary with extensive discussion of his relationship with Vivian and his feelings about impending fatherhood). He's unable to focus on this theft when Vivian's Grandmother calls Roger, looking for Vivian. Alerted to her disappearance, Roger starts combing the campus and finds a different Twostar -- Vivian's son, Nash, who is ripping pages from Roger's diary and taping them to the doors of student dorms. Roger has to go through four different buildings to collect them all, but at the end, he is more than aware of Nash's negative feelings about Roger impregnating his mother. Vivian reemerges from the library somewhat anticlimactically and some time later, after giving birth (a girl named Violet), she makes steps towards reuniting with Roger. At the same time and with incredible ease, Vivian finds the missing Cobb donation (in a box so confusingly mislabeled that it's shocking anyone could ever understand that "Cabb" really meant "Cobb"...), which turn out to be possible pages from the diary of Columbus. Roger, already riled by Vivian's encroaching on his academic territory, finds their authenticity hard to imagine, but Vivian goes ahead and contacts the latest in a long line of angry Cobbs about this discovery. Henry, a businessman with a somewhat unsavory reputation, immediately wires Vivian a thousand dollars so she can come to see him in in the Bahamas (his ability to step foot on American soil without being seized by authorities is in some question). So naturally, Vivian, Roger, Nash, and Violet all head down to the Bahamas to discover the secrets of Columbus.
The Crown of Columbus jumped to the top of my queue as a result of book club. It might be the first time that I've showed up to book club without finishing the book (or at least to the point where I couldn't finish the handful of pages while I sat and waited for people to arrive). As a result, I asked my fellow members to summarize the ending for me so I could participate fully in the discussion and my response to their summary was "Um... WTF?" When you read the summary that I've provided above, using only this information, can you guess where this all ends up? You might think you can, but I promise you that you can't. Yes, you might be able to predict the fights that Vivian and Roger get into and yet love conquers all. Yes, you might be able to predict that somehow, Violet ends up washed ashore from the sea, given the opening chapter that foreshadows this. Yes, you might be able to predict that Henry is up to no good and he believes there's some treasure in all of this. Yes, you might be able to predict that these academics suddenly go all Indiana Jones on us just because they can! But you, too, will still wind up going "WTF?" I would tell you the ending so you could understand this immediately, but I wouldn't want to rob you of what I consider the strongest reaction this book elicited in me.
So, I can't absolutely say that I enjoyed this book and I would heartily recommend it, though there were several mildly amusing and interesting parts. (The scene where Nash rips up Roger's diary and pastes the pages to various dorm room doors sticks out in my mind.) I've read a number of high praise reviews online, so perhaps I'm in the minority (and maybe I can avert the fate of the college administration by offering criticism to Native American authors because I, too, am a teensy bit Native American?), because I only found this book to be so-so. Three and a half stars out of five feels generous, and if kept to whole numbers, I'd downgrade to three. The reason for it is this: no reader will every be as interested in these characters as I'm sure Dorris & Erdrich were. It's absolutely impossible. Vivian = Louise and Roger = Michael, fictionalized and with a few little twists (like Roger being white, except Michael was likely all white, too... more on that later). Clearly, these characters were drawn from their experiences and the amusing idea of "hey, we could do an Indiana Jones thing!" And much like Indiana Jones, we get all Biblical at the end, even when we thought we were just chasing something that belonged in a museum. I wasn't ever necessarily bored, but it was very easy to set this book aside for something else until the action scenes, and even then you kept reading because the end was in sight. The majority of the book is spent in Hanover, going through some semi-realistic relationship issues and some of the most detailed descriptions of pregnancy that I've ever encountered in literature (granted, I don't seek these out). We set ourselves up for complication. Personally, I feel that Vivian's dismissal of Roger is much too abrupt to be believable, but I made some allowances for this when she ends up returning to try things again. The whole Columbus plotline? It almost intrudes on the bigger issues surrounding Vivian and Roger's relationship and Nash's teenage rebellion. The only thing that made the Columbus plotline acceptable was the fact that Erdrich and Norris went to a great deal of trouble to look at the issue from a number of perspectives and even the characters themselves are open to new ideas. Vivian is looking for vindication of native people; Roger is looking for a man with ambition and poetry; Henry is seeking a clever entrepreneur. Eventually, we fly down to the Bahamas, find ourselves in an adventure novel (with quite limited adventure, though), and, by the end of the book, just when things look grim, everything turns out okay! And on top of that, silent and grunting Nash (Vivian advises Roger to think of her son as "Gnash" at one point) is ridiculously eloquent and observant in the one chapter that is narrated from his perspective (so Louise and Michael--I mean Vivian and Roger--are good parents, too!). Oh, and Henry Cobb is a terribly one-note villain. And Roger's poem sucks. Dorris is a much better poet than Roger Williams.
Frankly, I found that the story behind the novel about Erdrich and Dorris was far more interesting than the book, though incredibly tragic. Michael Dorris was the first single man to be approved for adoption in the United States, adopting a Lakota boy who turned out to suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Dorris brought the issue of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to a wider audience, particularly as an issue important to the Native American community, and wrote a memoir on his experience. He ended up adopting other children who likely suffered from the same issue. Dorris met Erdrich while teaching at Dartmouth (he was a teacher and she was a student). They married and eventually had three daughters together, living what appeared to be quite a lovely life, before the story takes a dreadful turn. Dorris's son who inspired his memoir was killed the same year that this novel was published. A few years later, the second son that Dorris adopted accused both parents of child abuse; Dorris and Erdrich were unsuccessful in pursuing an extortion case against him in court. Shortly after, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings before Dorris committed suicide. The literary world was shocked, though later, it came to light that more abuse allegations were stirring, this time from one of their daughters. Since then, Erdrich has continued to receive acclaim for her work and only last year was nominated for a Pulitzer. Oh, and one last thing -- as for the Native American roots, clearly Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe tribe, but while Dorris claimed Modoc roots, this remains somewhat questionable. Evidently, since he is not enrolled in any tribe and there is no documented proof of ancestry, some people find his claim tenuous at best. What cannot be denied, though, is his devotion to Native American culture, and frankly I think this counts for a lot. Then again, I'm a very white redheaded girl with Acoma and Hispanic roots, so I know a few things about one's questionable origins.
As far as The Crown of Columbus is concerned, ultimately, the varied perspectives on Columbus and what he means for different groups of people were interesting, but the book wasn't as delightful as it could have been. Certainly it was pleasant, but there's a wealth of other fiction out there that have similar themes of solving historical puzzles... and you don't need to go to Dan Brown for it. If this is a genre you enjoy, then it's likely that you'll also enjoy this one. I'm just not sure I'd put a hugely enthusiastic recommendation behind it.
Louise Erdrich-- I mean Vivian Twostar is an untenured professor at Dartmouth College, heading up the Native American Studies department and clashing regularly with the administration, who might be less hesitant in their dismissal of her as an unconventional professor if it weren't for the fact that it would look bad to let go of the only Native American on staff. As a bit of a peace offering (no pun intended... well... not much of one) and to add to her meager list of published work (which might help her bid for tenure and secure some stability to her existence), she has agreed to write and publish an article on Columbus for the approaching quincentennial celebrations. Naturally, the college administration would hope for a Native American perspective, to which Vivian responds, "I told them to advertise on reservations for a series of 'Discover Spain' tours. Twenty-eight days, flamenco included. I said the government should erect a huge neon sign near Samana Cay that flashed morning, noon and night: 'Wrong Way to Calcutta.'" Clearly, Vivian marches to her own drummer, refusing to submit to stereotypes from any of the number of people who lay claim to her. She has a teenage son named Nash, whose father has long since left to start his "real family" out in California, and they share their home with Vivian's Grandmother, who raised young Vivian after her own mother left. Being left seems to be a theme in Vivian's life, so when she finds herself pregnant with the baby of fellow professor Roger Williams, she preemptively ends things with him, explaining that she knows he'll be frustrated, be disappointed, and abandon them soon enough, so they might as well end things now.
More about Michael Dorri-- ahem. Roger Williams. In most reviews of this book that I've read, they cite Roger as being everything Vivian is not. Well, this is true, except they're both intelligent professors working on pieces that have to do with Columbus while living in Hanover, New Hampshire, so let's keep it in perspective. They approach life from different perspectives. A very white poet and English professor with a stereotypically wealthy WASP family, Roger lives the life of a bachelor with means. A creature of habit, he has a very specific routine and keeps a clean home, without clutter and without much complication. For some time now, he has been working on an epic poem about Columbus entitled "Diary of a Lost Man." Vivian completely disrupts his life, from even the first moment of their meeting. They quickly become lovers, enjoying their secret liaison until Vivian announces her pregnancy and, therefore, the end of their affair. It is Vivian who puts an end to things, but Roger does not follow her or demand to be part of her life. She has read him right in the sense that her family and their baby would entirely upend his existence but the question then becomes whether he wants to adjust and find value in this new life (or really, if he's even capable of doing so).
Vivian falls asleep in the library one day, to awake around midnight and find that she's been locked in. Heavily pregnant, experiencing Braxton Hicks contractions, and worried about her somewhat troublesome teenage son, Vivian deals with her situation by continuing to research Columbus (um, because aren't we all this rational?). She stumbles across letters from the Cobb family, a Dartmouth dynasty that, according to these letters, seem to emphasize a family trait of feeling that the college has stolen something from them by misplacing a gift from one of their ancestors. During the course of that same night of Vivian's library imprisonment, Roger had a somewhat different encounter with an angry relative. He enters his home with the distinct feeling that a person who lives alone can have when they feel that someone else has been there. His fear is confirmed when he finds his personal diary missing (a diary with extensive discussion of his relationship with Vivian and his feelings about impending fatherhood). He's unable to focus on this theft when Vivian's Grandmother calls Roger, looking for Vivian. Alerted to her disappearance, Roger starts combing the campus and finds a different Twostar -- Vivian's son, Nash, who is ripping pages from Roger's diary and taping them to the doors of student dorms. Roger has to go through four different buildings to collect them all, but at the end, he is more than aware of Nash's negative feelings about Roger impregnating his mother. Vivian reemerges from the library somewhat anticlimactically and some time later, after giving birth (a girl named Violet), she makes steps towards reuniting with Roger. At the same time and with incredible ease, Vivian finds the missing Cobb donation (in a box so confusingly mislabeled that it's shocking anyone could ever understand that "Cabb" really meant "Cobb"...), which turn out to be possible pages from the diary of Columbus. Roger, already riled by Vivian's encroaching on his academic territory, finds their authenticity hard to imagine, but Vivian goes ahead and contacts the latest in a long line of angry Cobbs about this discovery. Henry, a businessman with a somewhat unsavory reputation, immediately wires Vivian a thousand dollars so she can come to see him in in the Bahamas (his ability to step foot on American soil without being seized by authorities is in some question). So naturally, Vivian, Roger, Nash, and Violet all head down to the Bahamas to discover the secrets of Columbus.
The Crown of Columbus jumped to the top of my queue as a result of book club. It might be the first time that I've showed up to book club without finishing the book (or at least to the point where I couldn't finish the handful of pages while I sat and waited for people to arrive). As a result, I asked my fellow members to summarize the ending for me so I could participate fully in the discussion and my response to their summary was "Um... WTF?" When you read the summary that I've provided above, using only this information, can you guess where this all ends up? You might think you can, but I promise you that you can't. Yes, you might be able to predict the fights that Vivian and Roger get into and yet love conquers all. Yes, you might be able to predict that somehow, Violet ends up washed ashore from the sea, given the opening chapter that foreshadows this. Yes, you might be able to predict that Henry is up to no good and he believes there's some treasure in all of this. Yes, you might be able to predict that these academics suddenly go all Indiana Jones on us just because they can! But you, too, will still wind up going "WTF?" I would tell you the ending so you could understand this immediately, but I wouldn't want to rob you of what I consider the strongest reaction this book elicited in me.
So, I can't absolutely say that I enjoyed this book and I would heartily recommend it, though there were several mildly amusing and interesting parts. (The scene where Nash rips up Roger's diary and pastes the pages to various dorm room doors sticks out in my mind.) I've read a number of high praise reviews online, so perhaps I'm in the minority (and maybe I can avert the fate of the college administration by offering criticism to Native American authors because I, too, am a teensy bit Native American?), because I only found this book to be so-so. Three and a half stars out of five feels generous, and if kept to whole numbers, I'd downgrade to three. The reason for it is this: no reader will every be as interested in these characters as I'm sure Dorris & Erdrich were. It's absolutely impossible. Vivian = Louise and Roger = Michael, fictionalized and with a few little twists (like Roger being white, except Michael was likely all white, too... more on that later). Clearly, these characters were drawn from their experiences and the amusing idea of "hey, we could do an Indiana Jones thing!" And much like Indiana Jones, we get all Biblical at the end, even when we thought we were just chasing something that belonged in a museum. I wasn't ever necessarily bored, but it was very easy to set this book aside for something else until the action scenes, and even then you kept reading because the end was in sight. The majority of the book is spent in Hanover, going through some semi-realistic relationship issues and some of the most detailed descriptions of pregnancy that I've ever encountered in literature (granted, I don't seek these out). We set ourselves up for complication. Personally, I feel that Vivian's dismissal of Roger is much too abrupt to be believable, but I made some allowances for this when she ends up returning to try things again. The whole Columbus plotline? It almost intrudes on the bigger issues surrounding Vivian and Roger's relationship and Nash's teenage rebellion. The only thing that made the Columbus plotline acceptable was the fact that Erdrich and Norris went to a great deal of trouble to look at the issue from a number of perspectives and even the characters themselves are open to new ideas. Vivian is looking for vindication of native people; Roger is looking for a man with ambition and poetry; Henry is seeking a clever entrepreneur. Eventually, we fly down to the Bahamas, find ourselves in an adventure novel (with quite limited adventure, though), and, by the end of the book, just when things look grim, everything turns out okay! And on top of that, silent and grunting Nash (Vivian advises Roger to think of her son as "Gnash" at one point) is ridiculously eloquent and observant in the one chapter that is narrated from his perspective (so Louise and Michael--I mean Vivian and Roger--are good parents, too!). Oh, and Henry Cobb is a terribly one-note villain. And Roger's poem sucks. Dorris is a much better poet than Roger Williams.
Frankly, I found that the story behind the novel about Erdrich and Dorris was far more interesting than the book, though incredibly tragic. Michael Dorris was the first single man to be approved for adoption in the United States, adopting a Lakota boy who turned out to suffer from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Dorris brought the issue of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome to a wider audience, particularly as an issue important to the Native American community, and wrote a memoir on his experience. He ended up adopting other children who likely suffered from the same issue. Dorris met Erdrich while teaching at Dartmouth (he was a teacher and she was a student). They married and eventually had three daughters together, living what appeared to be quite a lovely life, before the story takes a dreadful turn. Dorris's son who inspired his memoir was killed the same year that this novel was published. A few years later, the second son that Dorris adopted accused both parents of child abuse; Dorris and Erdrich were unsuccessful in pursuing an extortion case against him in court. Shortly after, Dorris and Erdrich separated and began divorce proceedings before Dorris committed suicide. The literary world was shocked, though later, it came to light that more abuse allegations were stirring, this time from one of their daughters. Since then, Erdrich has continued to receive acclaim for her work and only last year was nominated for a Pulitzer. Oh, and one last thing -- as for the Native American roots, clearly Erdrich is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe tribe, but while Dorris claimed Modoc roots, this remains somewhat questionable. Evidently, since he is not enrolled in any tribe and there is no documented proof of ancestry, some people find his claim tenuous at best. What cannot be denied, though, is his devotion to Native American culture, and frankly I think this counts for a lot. Then again, I'm a very white redheaded girl with Acoma and Hispanic roots, so I know a few things about one's questionable origins.
As far as The Crown of Columbus is concerned, ultimately, the varied perspectives on Columbus and what he means for different groups of people were interesting, but the book wasn't as delightful as it could have been. Certainly it was pleasant, but there's a wealth of other fiction out there that have similar themes of solving historical puzzles... and you don't need to go to Dan Brown for it. If this is a genre you enjoy, then it's likely that you'll also enjoy this one. I'm just not sure I'd put a hugely enthusiastic recommendation behind it.
April 30, 2019
As a sworn fan of Louise Erdrich, this low rating hurts me quite a lot: as someone who has now read all her published novels, I have only the highest regard for her writing. I’ve only read one novel by Michael Dorris, but I really enjoyed it too. Having loved these authors separately, I was really looking forward to see what they’ve created together.
Unfortunately, it seems two greats sometimes cancel each other out.
The book, while finely written, seems to be a bit dragging and... nagging. It was a strange mixture of an intelligent romance novel meeting a crime story á la Indiana Jones, that kept shifting from history lessons on the discovery of America to loves-me-loves-me-not to literarature lessons and philosophy.
I couldn’t help but feel that they were more inspired by each other and by working together than by the story they were actually telling. Which is nice, it’s a great way to celebrate their love, inspire each other and work together, but as a book - it was just ok, I guess.
Unfortunately, it seems two greats sometimes cancel each other out.
The book, while finely written, seems to be a bit dragging and... nagging. It was a strange mixture of an intelligent romance novel meeting a crime story á la Indiana Jones, that kept shifting from history lessons on the discovery of America to loves-me-loves-me-not to literarature lessons and philosophy.
I couldn’t help but feel that they were more inspired by each other and by working together than by the story they were actually telling. Which is nice, it’s a great way to celebrate their love, inspire each other and work together, but as a book - it was just ok, I guess.
November 13, 2017
I am a great fan of both authors and read this book when it was first released. All that I can remember is that it was so very, very bad.
September 5, 2008
This is the ONLY thing I have ever read by Louise Erdrich that I didn't absolutely love (and yes, I have read almost everything she has written.) So far below her usual standards on all counts that I never would have believed she had written it if her name wasn't there on the cover. Her late ex-husband Michael Dorris was a fine writer, too. I can't imagine what they were thinking. It's a potboiler, plain and simple. They must have had a bunch of bills to pay or something. Extremely disappointing.
February 6, 2019
Seriously underrated book. Louise Erdrich is AMAZING and this gem did not disappoint. I could not put down this book. This book is meaty and juicy, sweet and savory. History, family, love, mystery, suspense, he said and she said, protagonists you want to kiss and then slap. I am about to go read it again, right this minute, because I rushed through for the story and I want to go back and savor the delicious prose.
November 15, 2011
I can't believe I finished this book - that took determination. I HATED this book - the writing was stale and boring and the story was all over the place. Painful.
May 21, 2015
This would be an awesome text to study in a decolonization-based literature class!
My favorite paragraph may just be the one where the teenage son comes to terms with his grandmother's pedagogy: "Nothing, not even an event that had taken place before she was born, was fixed in it's interpretation. Truth was all in the story, in the way it was told and in who was doing the telling. It could change in a minute or remain the same forever. A truth lasted only until a better one came along and replaced it. Or sat alongside it, an equally plausible alternative. Try to explain that to a physics teacher. I did once, and it made him angry. He thought I was bullshi**ing him because I hadn't read the assignment, but I had. I had just made the fatal mistake of discussing it in Navajo with Grandma" (362).
I think some Native fiction texts become historical fiction sometimes because it's necessary to ground the characters in their collective history for those audiences unfamiliar with their history--or for those familiar but who can appreciate a wordsmith's concise and fresh telling. That this first excerpt below constructs a history lesson that doesn't take place until almost a hundred pages in gets the reader invested in the plot and the characters before they get a dose of what some might react adversely to, considering how little Americans are trained to deal with and move past white guilt or its opposite, racism.
How one of the main narrators, a Native Studies professor, concludes her introductory one particular afternoon: "My course was a survey of pre-1492 tribes but I always use the final class to introduce the impact of the Old World. Without writing systems, it was impossible for North American Indians to preserve precise accounts of their initial meetings with Europeans, and so I had to rely on hearsay, to read between the lines of the often pompous and fatuously self-serving Spanish or English accounts. Some of my hypotheses were pure logic: What would have been the reaction of people who were known to bathe several times a day when they found themselves closely quartered with a ship's crew who had not washed for months, for years, who did not even believe in washing? European chroniclers regularly assumed that the first Indians they met had bowed their heads and clapped their hands over their faces out of deep respect, but my guess was that they were holding their noses.
Dad news was another reason for waiting to discuss contact. i had just spent ten weeks conducting a tour of ancient America's greatest hits" ingenious exchange systems, subtle and complicated religions, thriving agriculture, political equity between men and women. The students had been an appreciative audience, wowed by ethnoscience, impressed by traditional arts, fascinated by the richness and beauty I revealed. 'Why didn't we know this?' they had asked time and again. 'Where did it all go?'/ Now I had to tell them . . . .
I began by dealing out some 'Discovery of America' cartoons, culled from various magazines and newspapers. in every frame, Columbus is a naive innocent craftily observed by a couple of unseen, jaded Indians. Christopher is lost, confused, wrongheaded, and the Indians are wiseassess--not like in the old social studies books, where they fall all over themselves to worship the ships with the cloudlike sails./ 'Do you have reservations?' a supercilious Native inquires of the Discoverer in the first illustration.
'Contact was a different type of experience for Indians than it was for Europeans,' I said. 'Over here you had hundreds of societies, millions of people, whose experience had told them that the world was a pretty diverse place. Walk for a day in any direction and what do you find? A tribe with a whole new set of gods, a language as distinct from your own as Tibetan is from Dutch--very little, in fact, that's even slightly familiar. The one common ground is how odd you and they appear to each other, so you figure, okay, different strokes for different folks, and let it go at that. There're too many of them, and no two tribes are the same. Forget sending out cultural missionaries, forget insisting that everybody agree which end is up, except among your own group. So when Indians met the boys from France or Portugal or Spain for the first time, it was just, 'Great, another set of weirdos in an unpredictable world. no big deal.'
'But they traded with them,' Kate insisted. 'They were interested.'/ 'Naturally,' I said. 'Europeans had great stuff for sale. Do you know how long it took an Arawak to fashion a nail out of shell? Than what do you do when it breaks? And mirrors! You try fixing your hair in a complicated do with nothing but a puddle of water to go by.'/ 'You're saying technology,' one of the budding economics noted. 'European inventions were attractive.'
'It was a two-way street,' I countered. 'Indians gave as much as they got, though they rarely received credit. What's a hamburger without fried potatoes and tomato ketchup?' His expression suggested that I had just named his ideal food. I didn't let up./ 'A third of the medicines we use today were developed over here long before the fifteenth century. Not to mention the Iroquois concept of representative government or the Equal Rights Amendment.'/ 'If the Indians were so smart, why aren't we sitting here speaking their language?' The salivating economist was not quite ready to concede. Thank God for a straight man.
'Languages,' I corrected. 'Thousands of them, which created a certain problem with internal communication, for spreading the word from tribe to tribe about what was going on. But really, it boiled down to just a few things. Number one, Europeans were organized and self-confident. After hundreds of years of fighting among themselves, they had developed a whole system of weapons that were superior to anything the Indians--whose "armies" rarely consisted of than a bunch of cousins out to raise hell--could throw back at them. Plus the fact that European powers had not only the will to win but the belief that it was their right. One god, one family from which all of their languages originated, one creation story, one agenda: to rule the world. Never underestimate the power of chutzpah and positive thinking. They absolutely believed that the earth was their oyster.'
Black Elk was woebegone. He, dressed in his sandals and Nicaraguan shirt, had resisted the charms of the Old World, so why did Indians succumb?/ 'Why couldn't they fight back?' he said, chagrined. 'Why did they surrender their lands so easily?'/ It was time to drop the real bomb./ 'It wasn't the cavalry,' I said. 'It was germs. The assault began invisibly, even accidentally, airborne, conveyed by touch, fleas, blood, a handshake. The first European who stood on the North American continent and coughed probably indirectly killed more Indians than George Armstrong Custer ever imagined in his favorite wet dream. It's estimated that more than a hundred million people lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1491, and nineteen out of every last twenty of them died from things like smallpox and measles and other infections imported from overseas. They didn't know what hit them. There was no precedent, no medicine that worked. The world came to an end, almost. A few people, by genetic chance, had a natural immunity, and they became the ancestors of today's Indian people.'
I paused . . . . 'Shut your eyes,' I instructed . . . 'Now imagine yourself in another time,' I suggested. 'You're part of a community, say the place where you grew up, populated with people like the ones you knew there. people in love. Married couples fighting with their in-laws. Children sneaking outside at night to look for shooting stars like you used to do. People planning revenge against their neighbors for an insult. people who expect tomorrow to be an improved-on repat of the day before. Then for no reason, they start getting sick in ugly ways. Scabs on their bodies. High fevers. Madness. They try every medicine they know, medicines that have usually worked, yet no matter what cures their trusted doctors attempt, they still keep dying. Old people and babies go first, then the strong. Almost everybody dies. Those who don't die right away are so lonely that they wish they had' . . . .
'When all your medicine fails, your science, people begin to search for religious or political explanations. God is angry, fate is cruel. Some assume it is the work of enemies, witches of some kind. Get them before they get us. Yet when you attack your neighbors it only spreads the diseases. Everything that you try to do makes things worse'" (85).
My favorite paragraph may just be the one where the teenage son comes to terms with his grandmother's pedagogy: "Nothing, not even an event that had taken place before she was born, was fixed in it's interpretation. Truth was all in the story, in the way it was told and in who was doing the telling. It could change in a minute or remain the same forever. A truth lasted only until a better one came along and replaced it. Or sat alongside it, an equally plausible alternative. Try to explain that to a physics teacher. I did once, and it made him angry. He thought I was bullshi**ing him because I hadn't read the assignment, but I had. I had just made the fatal mistake of discussing it in Navajo with Grandma" (362).
I think some Native fiction texts become historical fiction sometimes because it's necessary to ground the characters in their collective history for those audiences unfamiliar with their history--or for those familiar but who can appreciate a wordsmith's concise and fresh telling. That this first excerpt below constructs a history lesson that doesn't take place until almost a hundred pages in gets the reader invested in the plot and the characters before they get a dose of what some might react adversely to, considering how little Americans are trained to deal with and move past white guilt or its opposite, racism.
How one of the main narrators, a Native Studies professor, concludes her introductory one particular afternoon: "My course was a survey of pre-1492 tribes but I always use the final class to introduce the impact of the Old World. Without writing systems, it was impossible for North American Indians to preserve precise accounts of their initial meetings with Europeans, and so I had to rely on hearsay, to read between the lines of the often pompous and fatuously self-serving Spanish or English accounts. Some of my hypotheses were pure logic: What would have been the reaction of people who were known to bathe several times a day when they found themselves closely quartered with a ship's crew who had not washed for months, for years, who did not even believe in washing? European chroniclers regularly assumed that the first Indians they met had bowed their heads and clapped their hands over their faces out of deep respect, but my guess was that they were holding their noses.
Dad news was another reason for waiting to discuss contact. i had just spent ten weeks conducting a tour of ancient America's greatest hits" ingenious exchange systems, subtle and complicated religions, thriving agriculture, political equity between men and women. The students had been an appreciative audience, wowed by ethnoscience, impressed by traditional arts, fascinated by the richness and beauty I revealed. 'Why didn't we know this?' they had asked time and again. 'Where did it all go?'/ Now I had to tell them . . . .
I began by dealing out some 'Discovery of America' cartoons, culled from various magazines and newspapers. in every frame, Columbus is a naive innocent craftily observed by a couple of unseen, jaded Indians. Christopher is lost, confused, wrongheaded, and the Indians are wiseassess--not like in the old social studies books, where they fall all over themselves to worship the ships with the cloudlike sails./ 'Do you have reservations?' a supercilious Native inquires of the Discoverer in the first illustration.
'Contact was a different type of experience for Indians than it was for Europeans,' I said. 'Over here you had hundreds of societies, millions of people, whose experience had told them that the world was a pretty diverse place. Walk for a day in any direction and what do you find? A tribe with a whole new set of gods, a language as distinct from your own as Tibetan is from Dutch--very little, in fact, that's even slightly familiar. The one common ground is how odd you and they appear to each other, so you figure, okay, different strokes for different folks, and let it go at that. There're too many of them, and no two tribes are the same. Forget sending out cultural missionaries, forget insisting that everybody agree which end is up, except among your own group. So when Indians met the boys from France or Portugal or Spain for the first time, it was just, 'Great, another set of weirdos in an unpredictable world. no big deal.'
'But they traded with them,' Kate insisted. 'They were interested.'/ 'Naturally,' I said. 'Europeans had great stuff for sale. Do you know how long it took an Arawak to fashion a nail out of shell? Than what do you do when it breaks? And mirrors! You try fixing your hair in a complicated do with nothing but a puddle of water to go by.'/ 'You're saying technology,' one of the budding economics noted. 'European inventions were attractive.'
'It was a two-way street,' I countered. 'Indians gave as much as they got, though they rarely received credit. What's a hamburger without fried potatoes and tomato ketchup?' His expression suggested that I had just named his ideal food. I didn't let up./ 'A third of the medicines we use today were developed over here long before the fifteenth century. Not to mention the Iroquois concept of representative government or the Equal Rights Amendment.'/ 'If the Indians were so smart, why aren't we sitting here speaking their language?' The salivating economist was not quite ready to concede. Thank God for a straight man.
'Languages,' I corrected. 'Thousands of them, which created a certain problem with internal communication, for spreading the word from tribe to tribe about what was going on. But really, it boiled down to just a few things. Number one, Europeans were organized and self-confident. After hundreds of years of fighting among themselves, they had developed a whole system of weapons that were superior to anything the Indians--whose "armies" rarely consisted of than a bunch of cousins out to raise hell--could throw back at them. Plus the fact that European powers had not only the will to win but the belief that it was their right. One god, one family from which all of their languages originated, one creation story, one agenda: to rule the world. Never underestimate the power of chutzpah and positive thinking. They absolutely believed that the earth was their oyster.'
Black Elk was woebegone. He, dressed in his sandals and Nicaraguan shirt, had resisted the charms of the Old World, so why did Indians succumb?/ 'Why couldn't they fight back?' he said, chagrined. 'Why did they surrender their lands so easily?'/ It was time to drop the real bomb./ 'It wasn't the cavalry,' I said. 'It was germs. The assault began invisibly, even accidentally, airborne, conveyed by touch, fleas, blood, a handshake. The first European who stood on the North American continent and coughed probably indirectly killed more Indians than George Armstrong Custer ever imagined in his favorite wet dream. It's estimated that more than a hundred million people lived in the Western Hemisphere in 1491, and nineteen out of every last twenty of them died from things like smallpox and measles and other infections imported from overseas. They didn't know what hit them. There was no precedent, no medicine that worked. The world came to an end, almost. A few people, by genetic chance, had a natural immunity, and they became the ancestors of today's Indian people.'
I paused . . . . 'Shut your eyes,' I instructed . . . 'Now imagine yourself in another time,' I suggested. 'You're part of a community, say the place where you grew up, populated with people like the ones you knew there. people in love. Married couples fighting with their in-laws. Children sneaking outside at night to look for shooting stars like you used to do. People planning revenge against their neighbors for an insult. people who expect tomorrow to be an improved-on repat of the day before. Then for no reason, they start getting sick in ugly ways. Scabs on their bodies. High fevers. Madness. They try every medicine they know, medicines that have usually worked, yet no matter what cures their trusted doctors attempt, they still keep dying. Old people and babies go first, then the strong. Almost everybody dies. Those who don't die right away are so lonely that they wish they had' . . . .
'When all your medicine fails, your science, people begin to search for religious or political explanations. God is angry, fate is cruel. Some assume it is the work of enemies, witches of some kind. Get them before they get us. Yet when you attack your neighbors it only spreads the diseases. Everything that you try to do makes things worse'" (85).
January 14, 2026
Vivian, a Dartmouth professor and Native American, is very interested in the supposed discovery of the diary of Christopher Columbus. Anxious to prove how her native land was stolen ~ she and fellow professor Roger, who is also father to her newly born baby, travel to the Caribbean to see the proof.
A "series of unfortunate events" ensues.
An engaging human story, witty in the telling.
A "series of unfortunate events" ensues.
An engaging human story, witty in the telling.
December 23, 2019
2.5 Has a few brief moments, but this one is a clunker. Melodramatic, maudlin, and mostly about two pretty annoying people falling in and out and back in love. Idea over Execution
April 17, 2009
I picked this book up long ago, but didn't like the start (I guess) and put it aside, only to try again now. I found that I thoroughly enjoyed the tale, told as these authors's books often are, through several voices (often members of the same family). At least this one doesn't follow the reverse timeline pattern. This one starts as a kind of romance novel: two older academics (one Native American mix and the other New England blueblood) who end up having a child out of wedlock, but struggle to get past entrenched personality/character flaws to hopefully establish a healthy relationship (add in a teenage son, unhappy with the world; an angry opinionated grandmother; and two supportive colleague/friends). But it morphs into a mystery, as the protagonists struggle to deal with an unexpected discovery that shakes each's conceptions in opposite ways. The interplay is wonderful and the story fairly well told and interesting. You like the characters, root for them, despite their flaws. I enjoyed the early portions. . .their struggles in academia, research, teaching, relationships, family. It isn't a page-turner in the Grisham or Brown way, but it nonetheless keeps you interested and wanting to find out what happens in both arcs of the story. And there is a worthy villian. I won't give anything away, but think most people will be pleases, especially readers with some academic background in research or history.
October 30, 2009
This has been panned by reviewers, but I enjoyed it. It's an interesting novel with an academic setting--a female Native American Studies professor falls in love with a poet; both are engaged in contrasting efforts to reconstruct Christopher Columbus's "discovery" of American for the quincentennial. She discovers new evidence, which leads to adventure & near disaster. For me, it was, in some ways, a less intellectual version of A. S. Byatt's Possession. But it was also more personal. The couple has a baby, which the mother casually takes on research expeditions. The book is written in the alternating voices of the main characters (presumably in the alternating voices of the two authors). The woman matter-of-factly speaks of nursing & caring for the baby as an integral part of her life; the man gradually comes to discover the meaning of fatherhood. Though these elements take up relatively little space in the book, they are important.
May 12, 2015
This is arguably one of the worst books I've ever read. Granted, I'm reviewing it based on only the first half. I could not bring myself to go any further. That said, neither of the protagonists is even remotely likeable, the grandmother is an intolerable bitch and the teenage son is extraordinarily surly for no apparent reason other than he's a teenager. A book has to be pretty awful for me to discard it without finishing and this one definitely was. I do NOT recommend this book to anyone. It's terrible!
April 19, 2018
Native American woman pursues mysterious references to a lost treasure and original diary of Columbus from clues found when she was locked in a library overnight. Chapters are alternately told from her viewpoint and her lover's viewpoint. Plot has family relationships and adventure story rolled together. Lots of literary references. A good loaner book but probably not a re-read once you know how it all turns out.
September 19, 2015
It was okay. I might be missing something big but I totally don't get the ending. The poem was arduous and seemed misplaced in the book. For that matter, so was the odd ending, seems like cerebral things to be shoved in where they didn't belong. had it been wrapped up better and quicker I might have said it was interesting and entertaining but it was shooting for something else and failed in both. Oh well. It wasn't a complete loss but it could have been better.
July 20, 2011
Do not bother with this book. I enjoyed _The Master Butcher's Singing Club_ by Erdrich, and I am fascinated by Christopher Columbus and his legacy. But even though I was the perfect candidate for this book, I found it quite painful, especially at the end. I believe it failed on every level.
August 18, 2020
Actually, I don't remember why I put this book on my TR list. It was some time ago, but there must have been a reason...
I gave it up when I realized that although 78% through the book, I was still not interested and found myself browsing social media for nearly two hours trying to avoid opening the book again.
I gave it up when I realized that although 78% through the book, I was still not interested and found myself browsing social media for nearly two hours trying to avoid opening the book again.
October 2, 2007
This is the only book of Louise Erdrich that I do not like. Enough said.
September 3, 2010
I just couldn't get into this one.
October 17, 2019
I hated this book!
August 7, 2025
Vivian and Roger’s Excellent Adventure
So, y’know, like Vivian’s pregnant and she’s really p.o’ed at Roger who’s kind of uptight. They’re both professors at Dartmouth where strangely enough, the authors taught too, but after all, you’ve gotta write what you know. Vivian lives with her grandma and they are Native Americans, sort of, but from culturally different groups. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” is right around the corner and both profs have to produce some kind of memorial tribute. If you’re Native American, sure as shootin’ that dude who sailed the ocean blue ain’t gonna be one of your heroes. The baby is born and you can read some really exciting pages about how Vivian is really into taking care of the kid. Perfectionist Roger gets off on dressing right and cooking, but he doesn’t like to be disturbed when he works so they aren’t living together, then they are…it’s like an on and off thing. Vivian’s grandma is what big name writers sometimes call “irascible” (you can check that in the dictionary), but I guess she’s just tacked on for “Native American character”. Anyway, some clues turn up, like, some far out shells with Hebrew inscriptions, some old pages, and like that. Maybe Columbus left a great treasure somewhere in his travels over here in the New World. That sure would help Vivian write something, because like, she couldn’t come up with anything new. Writing about Columbus had been like “a thing” for centuries, so what fresh stuff could she say?
Anyhow, Vivian and Roger head for the Bahamas separately, Vivian traveling with Baby Violet, Roger with Vivian’s older son, Nash, a teenage turkey. On the island of Eleuthera, adventures begin, Vivian escapes the clutches of a baddie who’s after the treasure Columbus left behind, Roger has an epiphany in a cave, a treasure is found, but it ain’t what you think (and it’s covered in bat shit) and little Violet floats like Moses to safety. Vivian and the reformed Roger live together happily ever after, Nash shapes up too.
You know, these two writers were talented and produced some good books, but it’s not on show here, even though you can see their abilities shining through in places. This book is about earning money and as I can see on the usual shining cover found at airport book stores and on supermarket shelves, it was a “National Bestseller”. So, nice going Louise and Mike, but this ain’t literature, it’s soap opera.
So, y’know, like Vivian’s pregnant and she’s really p.o’ed at Roger who’s kind of uptight. They’re both professors at Dartmouth where strangely enough, the authors taught too, but after all, you’ve gotta write what you know. Vivian lives with her grandma and they are Native Americans, sort of, but from culturally different groups. The 500th anniversary of Columbus’ “discovery” is right around the corner and both profs have to produce some kind of memorial tribute. If you’re Native American, sure as shootin’ that dude who sailed the ocean blue ain’t gonna be one of your heroes. The baby is born and you can read some really exciting pages about how Vivian is really into taking care of the kid. Perfectionist Roger gets off on dressing right and cooking, but he doesn’t like to be disturbed when he works so they aren’t living together, then they are…it’s like an on and off thing. Vivian’s grandma is what big name writers sometimes call “irascible” (you can check that in the dictionary), but I guess she’s just tacked on for “Native American character”. Anyway, some clues turn up, like, some far out shells with Hebrew inscriptions, some old pages, and like that. Maybe Columbus left a great treasure somewhere in his travels over here in the New World. That sure would help Vivian write something, because like, she couldn’t come up with anything new. Writing about Columbus had been like “a thing” for centuries, so what fresh stuff could she say?
Anyhow, Vivian and Roger head for the Bahamas separately, Vivian traveling with Baby Violet, Roger with Vivian’s older son, Nash, a teenage turkey. On the island of Eleuthera, adventures begin, Vivian escapes the clutches of a baddie who’s after the treasure Columbus left behind, Roger has an epiphany in a cave, a treasure is found, but it ain’t what you think (and it’s covered in bat shit) and little Violet floats like Moses to safety. Vivian and the reformed Roger live together happily ever after, Nash shapes up too.
You know, these two writers were talented and produced some good books, but it’s not on show here, even though you can see their abilities shining through in places. This book is about earning money and as I can see on the usual shining cover found at airport book stores and on supermarket shelves, it was a “National Bestseller”. So, nice going Louise and Mike, but this ain’t literature, it’s soap opera.
June 17, 2021
Not a great book, but clearly both authors are very good writers.
I’m a huge fan of Michael Dorris, and also of Louise Erdrich.
If you are too, then read this book.
Louise started out editing Michael’s books.
Louise ended up with a huge audience, a huge bibliography, a bookstore and a publishing house.
Michael did not do as well.
Although, in the beginning, his was the brighter star, the preferred gender, the Professor, and the ‘Important Book,’ “Yellow Raft on Blue Water” which is still taught today in some college level courses in American Lit and Writing.
But, all you need to do is look at the back cover of Crown of Columbus and the photo of the two authors is uncomfortably prophetic. Louise is strong. Michael is carrying demons.
Therefore, while this book is not the best work of either, it is curiously semi-autobiographical. If you are a fan of either or both, there is something to glean here that will help you to sense their early life together.
I’m a huge fan of Michael Dorris, and also of Louise Erdrich.
If you are too, then read this book.
Louise started out editing Michael’s books.
Louise ended up with a huge audience, a huge bibliography, a bookstore and a publishing house.
Michael did not do as well.
Although, in the beginning, his was the brighter star, the preferred gender, the Professor, and the ‘Important Book,’ “Yellow Raft on Blue Water” which is still taught today in some college level courses in American Lit and Writing.
But, all you need to do is look at the back cover of Crown of Columbus and the photo of the two authors is uncomfortably prophetic. Louise is strong. Michael is carrying demons.
Therefore, while this book is not the best work of either, it is curiously semi-autobiographical. If you are a fan of either or both, there is something to glean here that will help you to sense their early life together.
October 14, 2018
As a lover of early US history, I so wanted to like The Crown of Columbus. But it plodded slowly. Richard was the stereotype of a bland professor of poetry. I kept thinking if a movie was made of the book, the most interesting person might be the Navajo grandmother. Everything Nash did was so predictable. Hard to believe someone could get locked in a library all night with no way to contact anyone. I also had a hard time understanding why Professor Twostar would take her entire family (including an infant) to a remote island to meet someone she knew nothing about. Except for the romance novel ending, there was no real resolution.
August 6, 2019
In the early 90's I enjoyed this collaboration of then married Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. A modern romance and a chase to the Caribbean in search of Christopher Columbus, this book captivated me some 25 years ago. One reviewer on Amazon called the characters parodies of Erdrich and Dorris themselves. When I read the book, instant in-depth (or superficial) information was not search-engine available, yet I still got a charge from this story and it's protagonists, assumed to be loosely based on Louis and Michael.
Happy reading. Perhaps you'll discover the Crown of Columbus.
Happy reading. Perhaps you'll discover the Crown of Columbus.
February 6, 2025
Such an entertaining and well-written book. I enjoyed learning so much about Columbus and the native Indians' point of view of the European arrival. The points of view of both Vivian and Roger, the two Dartmouth professors in their alternating chapters was always interesting. When the setting changed from New England to Eleuthera in the Bahamas, the book took a very unexpected turn. Suddenly, the intellectual novel became a page-turning suspense story. Great characters in this excellent read.
July 23, 2021
This book brought mixed reviews from the membership. What I especially liked about it was the contrast between the two story tellers. As they related the events of their lives, it was obvious that they each had a unique perspective which was completely different from the view of the other, even though they were describing the same event. This made me realize that this happens in all relationships, especially between men and women, and is the cause of much misunderstanding between the sexes.
January 15, 2026
I would rate it 3.5. The ultimate showdown between Cobb, Roger, and Vivian left me on the edge of my seat. But I think it could have been shorter and not lost anything. I liked Roger and Vivian’s banter and her disappearance at the beginning of the book. Vivian’s initial disappearance getting stuck in the library was entertaining. Nash strewing Roger’s diary throughout the campus will stick with me.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
September 16, 2025
interesting story but way over the top and so wordy to the point that I skimmed or skipped whole chapters to get back to the story and/or plot line. My perception was that the authors were being competitive by ( my made up words,) "out-poeticizing" or "out- intellectualizing" one another...and that was disappointing.
December 23, 2021
The book tells the story of professor Vivian Twostar’s life and her quest for the lost dairy of Christopher Columbus.
It’s an elongated bored one; none of the pages picked my interest. All of the characterizations were poor.
It’s an elongated bored one; none of the pages picked my interest. All of the characterizations were poor.
May 15, 2023
This is my all time favorite book. It intrigued me & kept my attention since they wrote it from the viewpoint of the main characters.
This book was based on historical places & people. I enjoyed how detailed the genealogy was documented.
This book was based on historical places & people. I enjoyed how detailed the genealogy was documented.
December 22, 2024
overall solid with good lines. i liked the shifting perspectives and the two authors. don't know if id reread it exactly. the climax was good but the epilogue i didnt care for. the last last part connected to the very beginning but otherwise felt pretty untied into the story at large.
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