I am a big fan of Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, but I haven’t always enjoyed her later books as much. After The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which was a little slow for my tastes, I wasn’t sure that I would pick up her next book. When The Plague of Doves was released—and garnered a lot of good reviews—I bought it. Still, it sat on my bookshelf for a couple of years before I finally picked it up this week.
Like much of Erdrich’s work, The Plague of the Doves is the story of several families throughout several generations on and around a reservation town in North Dakota. The book begins with the brutal murder of a family on the edge of the reservation, where only a baby survives. This event haunts the rest of the novel, which is narrated in the voices of a number of different characters, both Native American and white. As the novel unfolds, stories loop back on one another to reveal the facts about the murder and to describe all of the consequences that rippled out from that tragedy.
I found all of the characters in this book rich and compelling, but I especially enjoyed every section of the novel that returned to the story of Mooshum—a young boy at the time of the titular “plague of the doves” and a cantankerous grandfather in the present. From his childhood elopement to the story of his missing ear tip to the ways in which he torments the parish priest, Mooshum is a character to relish!
After The Plague of the Doves, I’m definitely up for Erdrich’s next book.
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