Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country: Traveling Through the Land of My Ancestors

by Louise Erdrich

For more than twenty years Louise Erdrich has dazzled readers with the intricately wrought, deeply poetic novels which have won her a place among today's finest writers. Her nonfiction is equally eloquent, and this lovely memoir offers a vivid glimpse of the landscape, the people, and the long tradition of storytelling that give her work its magical, elemental force.
In a small boat like those her Native American ancestors have used for countless generations, she travels to Ojibwe home ground, the islands of Lake of the Woods in southern Ontario. Her only companions are her new baby and the baby's father, an Ojibwe spiritual leader, on a pilgrimage to the sacred rock paintings their people have venerated for centuries as mystical "teaching and dream guides," and where even today Ojibwe leave offerings of tobacco in token of their power. With these paintings as backdrop, Erdrich summons to life the Ojibwe's spirits and songs, their language and sorrows, and the tales that are in their blood, echoing through her own family's very contemporary American lives and shaping her vision of the wider world. Thoughtful, moving, and wonderfully well observed, her meditation evokes ancient wisdom, modern ways, and the universal human concerns we all share.
"This book is a treasure and a delight."--"Minneapolis Star Tribune"

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Travel, Indigenous, Native American, Nature, History

160 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2003

About the author

Louise Erdrich is one of the most gifted, prolific, and challenging of American novelists. Her fiction reflects aspects of her mixed heritage: German through her father, and French and Ojibwa through her mother. She is the author of many novels, the first of which, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the last of which, The Round House, won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. She lives in Minnesota.

source: Amazon

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 4 out of 5]

”My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands, islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, the rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I’m longing to read, are books in themselves.”

Louise Erdrich decides to take her eighteen month old daughter off to the land of her ancestors...Ojibwe Country. She needs to shake off this surprise pregnancy and introduce her newest daughter to her father and the land that spawned her. Tobasonakwut is the father of her daughter, Kiizhikok. He is a seerer, a seeker, a healer of his people. He is busy going wherever he is needed. It is difficult for Erdrich to contact him, but she knows that it isn’t for her to find him. He will find them.

”His people were the lake, and the lake was them. At one time, everyone who lived near the lake was essentially made of the lake. And the people lived off fish, animals, the lake’s water and water plants for medicine; they were literally cell by cell composed of the lake and the lake’s islands.”

She is 48 years old and the mother of a baby. It’s terrifying and exhilarating.

Erdrich has a bookstore in Minneapolis, one she opened with her daughters to do something together that they all enjoy. Books line the walls of their homes, lay in piles wherever there is a flat space, and when a quilt is thrown over the top of a square stack of books, they form a table. Books are as infused into their lives as the need for eating and breathing. While on this trip, Erdrich becomes enthralled with a book called Austerlitz by Sebald, and she talks about reading it deep in the night to take her far, far away from the cheap motel and to somewhere all of her insecurities will become smoke. ”Books. Why? For just such a situation. Marooned in this uneasy night, shaken by the periodic shudder of passing semi trucks, every sentence grips me. My brain holds onto each trailing line as though grasping a black rope in a threatening fog. I finish half a page, then read it over again, then read the next half of the page and then the entire page, twice. Not many books can be read with such intimacy, nor are there many so beautifully composed that the writing alone brings comfort.”

Last night I woke in the middle of the night and began to read Austerlitz. Sometimes we read the right book at the right time, and certainly this book was exactly what Erdrich needed. I respect the obsessiveness and warmth with which she writes about the reading experience. It didn’t take me long to discover why she was reading and rereading pages. The paragraphs are composed of long, sinuous, complex, and lush sentences. Readers are not used to encountering sentences like these. Few read James Joyce or William Faulkner anymore, and most give up on those books practically before they begin to read them. An editor will read Sebald, and she will itch to break these sentences up into smaller bites, which will make them easier to read, but will turn a feast into a series of snacks. It took me a while to adjust, but I didn’t feel agitation, just excitement. Here is a challenge for my mind. How long can I hold a thought before the threads start to unravel?

More about Sebald when I finish the book.

Ojibwe Country sprawls across Minnesota and into Ottawa. Erdrich meets up with Tobasonakwut on the Canadian side of the border, and he shows her the rock paintings of their ancestors. The artists used sturgeon oil to preserve their paintings, and that is how paintings that are 400-1000 years old are still vibrant with color. She visits an island of eleven thousand books and finds a book that has her muttering “my precious, oh my precious” like Gollum in Lord of the Rings. In that moment, she understands the need for collectors to possess.

She has an encounter with the Border Patrol that leaves her and I shaken. ”What have they done to me?” I heard myself saying out loud, “Tell them who you are; tell them to google who you are.”

Can you prove this baby is yours?

What?

Our country has become a nightmare.

This book is a National Geographic Directions book. I’ve read the Jan Morris book about Wales, and there are many more that look interesting. In the back of the book, there is a list of the writers who are participating, and most of them will be names you recognize. They are short books, but so far, they are proving to be powerful books. Who better to travel with than literary writers with special connections to the places they will take you?

Check out the twenty-one possibilities for your next armchair adventure: https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/1....

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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[Dorothea · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had never read anything by Louise Erdrich before, but I knew right away, from the first paragraph --

My travels have become so focused on books and islands that the two have merged for me. Books, islands. Islands, books. Lake of the Woods in Ontario and Minnesota has 14,000 islands. Some of them are painted islands, the rocks bearing signs ranging from a few hundred to more than a thousand years old. So these islands, which I'm longing to read, are books in themselves...

--that I had to read Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country.

Some other reviewers on Goodreads (perhaps with different expectations, from having read Erdrich's novels?) were disappointed with this book; they said it was about trivial things. Well, it's a short read, if you like, and Erdrich uses an easy, chatty style, and it's about a woman going sight-seeing with her baby. It is also about, among other things:

+ How to prepare physically and psychologically for going on a journey
+ What books are for
+ The coexistence of land and human history
+ What babies are for
+ The language one grows up speaking and the language one hears only in prayers and the language one strives desperately to learn as an adult
+ How to return from a journey

It is a short book and there's a lot in it, and I think when I read it again -- maybe on an island, maybe when I'm forty-eight -- I will find it just as deep and clear and satisfying.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

In my pre-GR days when I was first making reading a serious pursuit, my strategy was rarely more complicated than picking out intriguing looking covers and bleeding previously successfully indulged authors dry. Over the years, as my vistas grew more broad and my tastes more discerning, my ability to stick with a chosen name for any length of time has progressively shortened, and I have little issue with striking off prospective reads if a second, or even first, book goes awry, especially if I have not yet acquired any physical copies. However, as these misadventures are almost always on the fiction side of things, lately I've made a habit in such instances, if an author's bibliography allows for such, of switching over to nonfiction, hoping to rediscover the appeal without running to as many of the tropes. Erdrich is a name who persistently tantalizes me with more than a dozen well received and appreciably diversely themed works, so when the rare instance occurred and, instead of another shiny-stickered narrative, a slim memoir with her name on the cover crossed my path, I didn't think twice about snatching it. Now that I'm finished, I am glad to say that I am keen on continuing my trajectory through the author's fiction side (with one particular work concerned with gender-bending in my sights): this was a reprieve that I not only needed with regards to my views on the author, but also humanity, the ecosystem, my home country, and even the broader, sprawling profundity of future timelines. Pretty good for a short work that turned out to be a further 30 pages shorter than its log on this site currently proclaims.

I can't imagine home without an overflow of books.

Now, I knew I was going to be extraordinarily biased towards this work, what with my own heart and soul being overtly displayed in the book's title and generously explored in the limited content through sentences such as the one above. What I didn't expect was a rather philosophical turnaround regarding a particular slogan that has plagued the modern timeline for at least the past four years. MAGA: Make America great again. You see, Erdrich has a sense that follows a similar trajectory, but her perspective is far more one of MOGA: Make Ojibwe great again, a concept that, thanks to the entrenched, complicated, and often sordid interweaving that winds through this country of mine, necessarily implies MpAGA: Make pre-America great again, or perhaps that should be Make post-American great again. Ideally, there wouldn't even be an America, and sense of restoration would be devoted to smaller concerns of sturgeon populations, fluent Ojibwe-speaker populations, thunderbirds (actual ones, mind you), Manoominikeshii, elm trees surviving the ever warmer winters of encroaching climate change, humans once again giving birth on the islands of their ancestors.

In the wake of a controversy regarding a not so native author, I've superficially delved into conversations regarding community, culture, and blood quantum; to my untrained, purebred WASC mind, Erdrich is so deeply concerned with yet instinctively enmeshed in the habitus of a lifeline that spans a good ten thousand years, at least, that I trust her fiction more than I had even before that aforementioned event painfully shook my confidence in my own critical faculties. I was also pleasantly surprised by her tastes in fiction, and her mention of more than one book on my TBR has me contemplating the far off venues of both post 2020 reading challenge goals and pre 2021 reading challenges, depending on the publication year. All in all, a lovely, lovely meditation on themes that veer so much from customary modern concerns in such a humane manner that the fact that I don't get more of it in my media (although 'Avatar the Last Airbender' and Pose, both on Netflix, are really helping me out visual-media-wise) is really quite a shame. Another reason to give Erdrich another chance, and fortunately, she has plenty for me to choose from.

My reading choices of these are half the remains of my challenge reads, half a twenty-first century focus, and I am still adjusting to the change of having my reading line up with modern day technologies and social media. This meditation on the personal that manages to extend vast distances through both the national landscape and the future unknown is a rare piece, and while I don't love it or consider it a favorite, I recognize that one of its roots is the same that forms the crux of many a work that is. Tracks (another entry riddled with GRAmazon's puking obstinacy) introduced me to one of the most powerful evocations of mass death and destruction that I have ever encountered, and during these days of quarantine, I watch the United States tear itself apart for the sake of pride, power, money, and a certain smugness that those who matter will be able to wait this out on high as they always have been. While speaking with others, I've said that this will all probably boil down to the deaths of either the whos or the how manys, and the mass protests are only the beginning of what could happen. Erdrich is one who contemplated historical instances of situations such as this, albeit typically far more light-a-living-thing-with-a-magnifying-glass focused in nature, long before people started believing Coronavirus was a giant hoax, and I have to wonder what compositions of hers will come out of all of this, if any do at all. When "out" is, I have no idea, but I do hope the books and the islands are doing alright. I draw more strength from the thought of them than I do from that of most humans.

[Mmars · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really 3.5 stars. Somewhere on Rainy Lake, which borders Minnesota and Canada and reaches further north into the wilderness, there is one island among 1600 that has on it over 10,000 books. An Ojibwe bibliophile collected these over the course of a long life. Now, if you've ever paddled in the Boundary Waters Wilderness, or if you ever do, think about that. The is very harsh country. Winters can be bitterly cold and snowy and summers are often wet and rarely overly hot. It's also quite beautiful and still pristine. Very few visitors are allowed to visit the island, but Louise Erdrich is one who has that opportunity and she shares that in this brief treatise that interconnects the Ojibwe culture, islands and books.

As part of the National Geographic Directions series, this is in a sense a travel book, but not in the traditional sense. Louise Erdrich is 47 years old, has an 18-month-old daughter (her fourth) and she and the baby take a vacation to visit the baby's father and the island of the books. She writes, in what feels to be more of an exercise than a polished work. But that's okay. Her topics are interesting and well-relayed to the reader. The Ojibwe language, rock paintings, medicinal plants, and books and their collector are covered. She ties the theme of the book together nicely. Upon arriving home she realizes her bookstore is near what is known as the "Lake of the Isles' in Minneapolis.

This is an interesting little comfort read for by the lakeside or in front of a crackling fire. Recommended to Erdrich fans.

[Ann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Erdrich’s love of books and her Native culture shine throughout this book but I have to admit that I kept feeling like she had some deeper purpose for writing this that I was somehow missing. I’m participating in a book discussion with a Goodreads group about the book so maybe that will enlighten me. The cliff paintings in Lake of the Woods sound beautiful and fascinating.

As a side note, I don’t think I was at all familiar with the Ojibwe tribe prior to when I started to read books by William Kent Kruger, but from this book I learned that the tribe is also called Chippewa, a name with which I am quite familiar.

[Care · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Nouns are mainly designated as animate or inanimate, though what is alive and dead doesn't correspond at all to what an English speaker might imagine. For instance, the word for stone, asin, is animate. After all, the preexistence of the world according to Ojibwe religion consisted of a conversation between stones. People speak to and thank the stones in a sweat lodge, where the asiniing are superheated and used for healing. They are addressed as grandmothers and grandfathers. Once I begin to think of stones as animate, I started to wonder whether I was picking up a stone or it was putting itself into my hand. Stones are no longer the same as they were to me in English."

If my count is correct, this is my 22nd Louise Erdrich book. Yet Erdrich never fails to enchant me. I always look forward to her excellent writing and learning something new. She's one-of-a-kind.

I picked this up not just because I love her writing dearly but because @bookish.cori and @sitting.wishing.reading (on Instagram) are hosting a "Read What You Own" community book club and the February prompt was to read an unread Erdrich from your shelves. It was between this, Blue Jay's Dance, and The Crown of Columbus. All will be excellent, she is a treasure.

[gorecki · Rating 4 out of 5]

People have had words and stories long before they've had alphabets and writing. The desire to note things down, make sense of the world around us, to leave a message for those who come later has always been there, even when we didn't have our abc's and lengthy tomes of war and peace. Cave drawings, stone carvings, ancient cultures have always found a way to leave a message that would go a long way into the future and serve as a warning, a blessing or protection. In the case of the Ojibwe Native Americans, this also included elaborate drawings on the rocks and cliffs of the many islands in Lake of the Woods in Canada. Islands turned into books.

Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country is a little gem of a book - very short, but very full of information and insights on Ojibwe culture and history. When I first started it, I wasn't really sure what to expect and was delighted to see that this was not only a book about books and islands, but also a book about language, nature, healing, and finding your roots. While at first the "chapters" didn't seem very connected, the more I read and the more I think about it now that I've finished reading, the more connections I find.
Islands bear their own stories, which in cultures with strong storytelling traditions, such as the Ojibwe, often turns them into a sort book - this one has a ghost, this one has a demon. A family died on a third, a white man built a home on a fourth. Each island holds a story of what happened on it. Adding ancient drawings and paintings on cliffs and rocks turns them into books floating on the surface of the water, there for us to read.

Then there are Erdrich's musings on language and storytelling, language and books - the connection is obvious. Lose one, you lose the other. She describes her struggle to get a hold of the language of her ancestors and her efforts to learn it, the complicated grammar, and the many ways in which local communities work hard to keep it flourishing.

And of course there are the chapters on family, home and love, all of which are favorite parts of love when reading Erdrich.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is the perfect companion to William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor series set in Minnesota’s North Woods. I’ve been wanting to read Louise Erdrich for some time and this short glimpse into her writing confirmed my predilection.

If you love road trips and books this book is for you. Deep thoughts on her Native American heritage (Ojibwe) as well as books while on a road trip via boat and car through Minnesota and Canada.

Erdrich is of Ojibwe descent but doesn’t speak the language and longs to gain fluency in it. It is however an incredibly difficult language to learn. She’s in her mid to late 40’s with an infant daughter and two teenagers when she leaves her home in Minneapolis to head to the Lake of the Woods on the Canadian border.

She introduces the reader to Ernest Oberholtzer (1884-1977), one of the founders of the Wilderness Society and who maintained a 11,000 volume library in a cabin on a remote island. He is revered by the Ojibwe. Musings. Meditations. The death of her elm tree. Ticks!! It’s all there.

[Sonja · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a precious book but a different cover of a boat going through islands. I love looking at it. I loved reading it and have already reread it.
Louise Erdrich becomes a mother at 48. She goes with her baby Kiizhikok to look for the father who is an Ojibwe healer. His name is Tobasonakwut. But the book is also about the travel, her love of and encounters with books, and the Ojibwe language and culture. She says that books and islands (traveling them) have merged for her.
There are so many beautiful parts. I love when she speaks of the four spirit women who take care of all the waters of the world. And her love of books and being around them and they around her: “Being around books is only half about actual reading after all. The other part is talking about books with other people, a rich topic, and yet another it is enjoying their presence. Sitting in the bookstore half-light I feel a great contentment.”
Highly recommend

[Mia Tiger · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautiful writing linking themes with culture and history in a way I’ve never come across before. I always like the idea of vignettes but I find reading them quite disruptive because I want time to reflect on each one as not to overwrite the previous one. To be consumed like water on a hike - LITTLE and OFTEN!!!

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This memoir transported me to places I would love to visit.

And I feel like I have with the wisdom and knowledge to have some understanding of the painted rocks and the messages they still share hundreds or thousands of years later.

I particularly connected to the Ojibwe tradition of storytelling and was absolutely amazed by the wealth of the language. A language you could learn all your life and never completely conquer.

Erdrich's travels with her small daughter from island to island and her observations of the wild life and the scenery captivated me completely.

She was so privileged to visit Ernest Oberholtzer's wondrous island of books and I was privileged to learn of such a place.

Her discussions about books inspired me.

So much delight in so few pages!

[Melody Schwarting · Rating 4 out of 5]

Books. Why?

In this meditative memoir, Erdrich writes of books, stories, and people, and of their whys. She details the cherishing, complex language of Ojibwe; Anishinaabe painted rocks; a curious man and his 11,000 book collection; and her young daughter's connection to animals.

After having read as many Erdrich novels as I have, I was eager to venture into her non-fiction. I found it as particular and funny as her fiction, but personal. The landscapes of northern Minnesota and southern Canada she describes brought me back to childhood summers in northern Wisconsin. Erdrich is an unrestrained bibliophile, and sharing her delight in books was one of the great pleasures of this read.

One to return to and treasure in years to come.

[Michaela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ich liebe Louise Erdrichs Romane und habe jetzt zum ersten Mal ihre Beschreibung einer Reise durch die Inseln ihrer Heimat Ojibwe Country mit ihrer jüngsten Tochter und deren Vater gelesen. Die Autorin zeigt ihrer Tochter die Natur, die Seen und Inseln, Planzen, Tiere und heiligen Orte und lernt dadurch selbst mit ihrer späten (weiteren) Mutterschaft und den Ängsten fertigzuwerden. Auch besucht sie Ernest Oberholtzers Bibliothek und beschreibt die Gründung ihrer Buchhandlung mit Verlag Birchbark, lernt die Sprache ihrer Vorfahren und erklärt Wörter, Gebräuche und die Schwierigkeiten der Ojibwe in der heutigen Zeit. Das einzige, was ich daran kritisiere, ist die Uneinheitlichkeit des Buches, das von einem zum anderen Thema ohne großen Übergang springt, Sonst durchaus empfehlenswert.
Danke an den Aufbau Verlag und Netgalley für ein Rezensions-Ebook im Gegenzug für eine ehrliche Rezension.

[Kätlin Kaldmaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Give me books & give me islands any time of the day & night. I’ll take it & run.
At the Daunt bookstore, my daughter & I, we were browsing the books, obv. & when we met at the till we both had this one in our piles. We only got one copy & I know now we need another one. This one is a keeper, a book to always have at hand, a book to live with.
Louise Erdrich is telling stories of her two travels to Ojibwe country, with her daughter/s, many years apart. Big bodies of water, huge collections of bookses, old stories of Ojibwe people & language, the sense of loss & the sense of finding. The language, the language, the language. The centre of our senses & understanding of the world.

There are huge rivers in Canada - St Laurent, St Anne, St Whatever. Once I asked what are these rivers really called, by the people who lived there (cherokii). Plain looks I got: These are the real names. Thank you, Louise Erdrich, for bringing some of the real names to your readers. Aitäh!

[Sarah Kimberley · Rating 5 out of 5]

A short memoir and lovely piece of sharp travel writing. I suddenly have a fascination with the North Midwestern history of America. There’s something very poignant about uncovering the life and rituals of the sacred indigenous people. Their connection to their homeland is woven in enchanting detail by Erdrich ✨

The Ojibwe people, as Erdrich discovers, hold the roots to America’s native written language. They not only used rock paintings as a form of geographical art, but also used birch bark scrolls as a form of book to write complex patterns and shapes. Some of these are yet to be dated by keen archaeologists. To think the earliest form of books have existed as long as they have.

Erdrich’s writing is down to earth and relaxed as she meditates on her experiences of the beautiful islands and lakes of southern Ontario. She with her baby daughter, travel through the land of her ancestors and honour it in vivid detail. I definitely recommend if you’re into social history and culture 🌿

[Kelly · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed reading this book in anticipation of spending a week at Mallard Island. Louise Erdrich writes about her time there on pages 100-131. Her love for books--Mazanibaganjigan in Ojibwe--comes through as both a cultural practice dating back to 2000BC in North America and also as a current obsession that engages her wherever she travels. I loved reading this book, not only because of the place, the books, the language, but also because her baby is with her throughout her travels. I love the model of how to live and travel in balance with life.

[Nora · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Schließlich geht es beim Umgang mit Büchern nur zur Hälfte ums Lesen. Genauso wichtig ist, dass man sich mit anderen Leuten über Bücher unterhält - ein endloses Thema - und dass man ihre Gegenwart genießt."

[Esme Kemp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, as has come to be expected from Ms Erdrich. Something about book lovers writing about books is just *chefs kiss*.

[Violet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bequtiful. Many facts reminded me of the more recent (and fictional) 'The Sentence' - obviously somewhat biographically inspired. I love her comments about language and identity, and her description of nature, while not the main focus, were stunning. It is a very short book and it reads easily, almost dreamily.

[Samantha Fraenkel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't think I've ever read a book that has so perfectly described what it means to be in love with books.

[Maia Ramsden · Rating 5 out of 5]

(I had the British edition whose cover is stunning!) I loved this little book — Erdrich’s prose is immersive and beautiful.

[Ron · Rating 3 out of 5]

A good one-day read. Based on Erdrich’s trip to islands in Lake of the Woods (northern Minnesota and southern Ontario), especially the island where the Ernest Oberholtzer foundation is located. Oberholtzer was a friend of nature and the Ojibwe people. At his death, he left behind a large book collection that Erdrich introduces to us. In addition, she gives us interesting commentary on Ojibwe rock art, language, and culture throughout the book. One of my favorite examples is her discussion of terms of farewell in Ojibwe. She mentions that for her people “goodbye” is “too final,” so instead they have invented terms like “weweni babamanadis, which translates roughly as an admonition to be careful as you go around being ugly in your ugly life.” The narrative, published by National Geographic, is a travel memoir and, as such, is rather light reading: interesting topics but no deep treatment of anything. Since the Oberholtzer library is constructed as the goal of the trip, one wishes for extensive treatment of that portion of the trip.

[Lynn · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another book I can't really describe - perhaps the non-fiction equivalent to If on a Winter's Night, though not nearly as strange. It's almost a thought journal, with observations on motherhood and riding in a canoe, on driving an old and beloved vehicle, on reading and wood ticks and the peculiar joys of Anishinaabemowin. It reads as if free-form, but it's clearly thought out and organised. If you're interested at all in the culture and language of the Ojibwe or the northern woods, you should enjoy it. I did.

[Allie Riley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louise Erdrich is easily one of my favourite writers. Prior to reading this, my only experience of her work had been her gloriously rich fiction. This wonderful, enlightening memoir was something to truly savour, despite, or perhaps because of, its brevity. I learnt a great deal and now have much more to investigate. Recommended.

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a magical book, I truly loved every page. Definitely made me feel nostalgic for Minnesota but also opened my eyes to a whole world I really knew nothing about which is the Ojibwe culture and language. Will definitely not be my only reading of this lovely journey.

[Colinda Clyne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book felt like a homecoming. Everything from Louise Erdrich is a gift.

[Bo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read Louise Erdrich’s stunning novel The Round House for a book club a few years ago and was instantly impressed by her literary talent. Over the pandemic, I read her most recent novels, The Night Watchman (which earned her the Pulitzer) and The Sentence. In this reader’s humble opinion, Erdrich stands out as one of America’s best living writers, as well as the one of the best living indigenous/Native American writers. With this background, I was excited to receive a copy of Erdrich’s 2003 memoir Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country from my parents for Christmas.

Rather than being a general memoir about Erdrich’s life, Books and Islands is more of a travelogue that focuses on a trip taken by Erdrich to the lakes and islands of southern Ontario, where she contemplates the landscapes and stone paintings she encounters, as well as her relationship with Ojibwe language and culture, time, and books. She writes simply but lyrically, whether she is inviting us into her interior thoughts and ruminations or describing indigenous beliefs and traditions or the natural world around her.

This beautifully designed paperback edition from Daunt Books includes an afterword from Erdrich, written a decade after the original trip, that adds to the overall arc of the book. I recommend this short but soothingly poetic book to readers of all interests, but in particular to anyone who has already read and loved Erdrich’s fiction.

[Stephanie McMillan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading this at the Minnesota Marine Art Museum in Winona—it was featured in their library nook & found it so captivating I quickly checked it out of the library. It’s a short, meandering story aptly titled. There’s some reflections on books and motherhood and the Ojibwe language. I’m not sure why I started here with Louise Erdrich’s writing but I know it’s the gateway and I will go on to read more of her work.

[Freya Abbas · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the three fires confederacy (Ojibwe, odaawaa, and Potawatomi), the role of the Ojibwe is to be the keepers of the birchbark scrolls. For Erdrich, writing and storytelling are what define Ojibwe culture. There was a lot about Erdrich’s personal life here that was interesting. Also, the story of the wolverine is unforgettable.

[pennyg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this! Books and islands, what's not to love. This is a short memoir about her trip to Southern Ontario, Homeland of the Ojibwe, reflecting on her heritage, nature and an island book collector. Sounding very much like a character from her novel, The Sentence.