ReviewsOfBooks.com

Your one stop for finding multiple professional reviews of recently released books.

The Painted Drum by Louise Erdrich

The Painted Drum begins in present-day New Hampshire, where Faye Travers, granddaugther of an Ojibwe woman, is an estate appraiser. When a neighbor dies, she's hired to catalog the Native American artifacts in his house. There she discovers a painted drum. Believing she hears a sound emanating from it, she steals the drum, and makes the trek to the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota to return it to whomever might own it there. Once there, an Obijwe storyteller recounts the story of the drum. Generations earlier, a woman named Anaquot was torn between her family and her lover, leading to the tragic death of her daughter. Her husband created the drum in memory of his daughter, eventually leaving it to his son. Now that the drum has returned to the reservation, it has one more role to play in the near-tragic circumstances of three children trapped in a snowstorm. Louise Erdrich's 11th novel has received mostly positive reviews with BookPage saying, "Erdrich's continuing saga of members of this Ojibwe reservation seamlessly blends unforgettable characters with reverence for the world of nature, and the traditional, sometimes mystical, beliefs of her own Native heritage, making The Painted Drum one of her finest offerings to date."