Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich: Book Beginning

Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, November 14, 2017, Harper

Genre: dystopian thriller 

Book beginning:

When I tell you that my white name is Cedar Hawk Songmaker and that I'm an adopted child of Minneapolis liberals,  and that when I went looking for my Ojibwe parents and found that I was born Mary Potts I hid the knowledge, maybe you'll understand. Or not. I'll write this anyway, because ever since last week things have changed. Apparently - I mean, nobody knows - our world is running backward. Or forward. Or maybe sideways, in a way  as yet ungrasped. I am sure somebody will come up with a name for what is happening, but I cannot imagine how everything around us and everything within us can be fixed. What is happening involves the invisible, the quanta of which we are created. Whatever is actually occurring, there is constant breaking news about how it will be handled - speculation, really, concerning what comes next -  which is why I am writing an account. 

Page 56:

My parents are both lawyers....Which is to say, they are shrewd as only market-based -society suspicious trust-fund liberals can be.

I was at first wary of the term "dystopian" to describe this book, as I am not a science fiction or dystopia lover,but the term "thriller" after the word dystopia sealed my interest in this novel. As does the name of the author, Louis Erdrich, whose previous books set among the Native Americans in the West I have really liked.

The narrator, Cedar Hawk Songmaker is, so far in my reading, a very intriguing personality and I am enjoying following her into her future discoveries, and into her dystopian world!

Memes: The Friday 56. Grab a book, turn to page 56 or 56% of your eReader. Find any sentence that grabs you. Post it, and add your URL post in Linky at Freda's Voice. Also visit Book Beginning at Rose City Reader

First Chapter: LaRose by Louise Erdrich

Bibliophile By the Sea hosts First Chapter, First Paragraph every Tuesday. Share the first paragraph(s) of your current read or book interest, with information for readers

LaRose by Louise Erdrich, published May 10, 2016 by Harper. 
A contemporary tale of a tragic accident, a demand for justice, and a profound act of atonement with ancient roots in Native American culture. 

First paragraph, first chapter:

NORTH DAKOTA, LATE SUMMER, 1999. Landreaux Iron stalks a deer along the edge of the property bordering his own. He shoots with easy confidence - but when the buck springs away, Landreaux realizes he's hit something else, a blur he saw as he squeezed the trigger. When he staggers closer, he realizes he has killed his neighbor's five-year-old son, Dusty Ravich. 

Dusty was best friends with Landreaux’s five-year-old son, LaRose.... Following an ancient means of retribution, he and wife Emmaline will give LaRose to Dusty's grieving parents. “Our son will be your son now,” they tell them. But a vengeful man begins raising trouble, hurling accusations of a cover-up the day Dusty died. (publisher)

Would you keep reading, based on the first paragraph and the book description? 

Book Review: The Round House by Louise Erdrich

Title: The Round House by Louise Erdrich
Published October 2, 2012; Harper Collins
Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction

Joe, he said carefully. I should have told you I am proud of you. I am proud of how you love your mother. Proud of how you figured this out. But you do understand that if something should happen to you, Joe, that your mother and I would...we couldn't bear it. You give us life... (ch. 5, from an advance reader's edition. The final copy may differ)

 I saw this as part coming of age story, part mystery, part political novel - a novel set in 1988 on a Native American reservation in North Dakota that addresses the "tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations." Problems are still being straightened out even after the Tribal Law and Order Act was signed in 2010 by presidential act to help remedy the situation.

Thirteen-year-old Joe, son of a reservation judge, decides to take matters into his own hands when the man who seriously attacked and brutalized his mother is let go, not prosecuted since it could not be proven exactly where the attack took place - on reservation land, state land, or fee land (land belonging to a tribe outside of the reservation).

The story involves the histories of several persons living on and off the reservation. These histories converge and create a situation that resulted in the attack on Joe's mother, who worked on the reservation and had access to a file crucial to the story.

Though they may seem superfluous to the story, many of the Native American traditional tales included in the novel show what helped form and shape Joe and his young Indian friends. The tales throw additional light on the customs and traditions of the Native Americans on the reservation.

The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction for 2012, a well deserved recognition.

Louise Erdrich is the author of thirteen novels, plus volumes of poetry, short stories, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. Award winners, Love Medicine, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, and The Plague of Doves are among them.

Erdrich, a Native American member of the Ojibwe and Chippewa nation is described as one of the most significant Native writers of the second wave of the "Native American Renaissance." She lives in Minnesota and is the owner of Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore.

For more reviews, visit the tour schedule. Thanks to TLC Book Tours and the author/publisher for a review ARC of the novel.