Reviews for The mighty red : a novel
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
Crystal hauls sugar beets from field to processing plant deep into the night in the Red River Valley in North Dakota. She’s hoping her daughter, Kismet, a high-school senior, will attend college. But Gary, whose family owns the area’s largest beet farm and who is tormented by the deaths of two of his football teammates, is begging Kismet to marry him. Smart and sensitive Hugo, Gary’s opposite, is also in love with Kismet. Homeschooled, he helps his mother in her bookstore. Gary’s mother worries about their use of dangerous agricultural chemicals. It’s 2008 and money it tight. Hugo, entranced by deep time and geology, plans to make his fortune in the oil fields. Martin, Kismet’s theater teacher father, seems to have absconded with looted funds. The story of the land, from holistic family farms to the decimation of the “joinery of creation” by industrial agriculture, shapes Erdrich’s finely woven tale of anguish and desire, crimes and healing. With irresistible characters, dramatic predicaments, crisp wit, gorgeously rendered settings, striking ecological facts, and a cosmic dimension, Erdrich’s latest tale of the plains reverberates with arresting revelations.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Readers will seek Erdrich’s newest take on the land and communities she knows so intimately.
Publishers Weekly
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Pulitzer winner Erdrich (The Night Watchman) follows the folks of the Red River Valley of North Dakota—the original home to the Ojibwe, the Dakota, and the Metis—in a captivating tale of love and everyday life amid environmental upheaval and the 2008 financial crisis. Crystal hauls sugar beets on the Geist family farm and counts her pennies while her partner, Martin, a failed actor who moonlights as a traveling arts teacher, spends money on impractical delights like salsa dancing. They share a daughter, Kismet, 18, who’s reviled at her high school for being a goth until Geist scion Gary falls in love with her. Kismet initially rejects Gary, but she’s softened by his persistence and agrees to marry him, a prospect Crystal opposes. Then there’s Kismet’s other suitor, Hugo, a bookish romantic who makes her laugh. At 16, Hugo plans to earn money in the fracking oil fields and save enough to steal Kismet away. The plot thickens when Martin disappears along with the local Catholic church’s renovation fund and when reports surface of a bank robber named the Cutie Pie Bandit, who earns their name for being disguised as characters like Rasputin. Threaded throughout the book are references to a tragic accident that ultimately resolves in a satisfying conclusion. Along the way, Erdrich digs deep into the effects of crop farming, pesticides, and the destruction of topsoil on the characters’ livelihoods. Erdrich excels at the slow simmer, and once again she delivers a deliciously seductive masterwork. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)
Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
The Red River of the North cuts a vivid track through the hardscrabble lives that anchor Erdrich’s surpassing North Dakota fiction. This deft, almost winsome novel begins at night, with Crystal Frechette, a trucker. She’s hauling sugar beets and wearing “a lucky hat knitted by her daughter,” Kismet Poe. Her headlights are “peacefully cutting radiant holes in the blackness” when she glimpses a mountain lion vault across the road. It’s a sign, but of what? Kismet, finishing high school, is edgy, furious, and bored. Both Gary Geist, her school’s quarterback, and Hugo Dumach, a nerdy home-schooler, fixate on her as the angel destined to slay their wildly divergent demons. This nutty love triangle kickstarts the plot; Kismet, in a futile stab at avoiding teen marriage, slips from a bridge into the cold Red River, floating downstream until she’s rescued. But true love here is the kind between mother and daughter. This pair, beset by the 2008 economic meltdown, proves expert in “getting trapped but at least not giving up.” Around them, a recent, communal catastrophe on the frozen river stays murky through three-quarters of the story. In counterpoint, the town’s daffy book club dissectsEat Pray Love andThe Road, each session blooming into comic set pieces. Erdrich reaches for some of her fictional staples: a waitressing gig, multiple viewpoints, and, always, mixed-heritage Native people trying to grasp and transmit that heritage. Her writing feels both effortless and wise. She notes a boy’s “shy armpits” and how a soundproofed house can feel “inhuman, maybe even violent.” Even if a minor character, the Catholic priest, bogs down in caricature, Erdrich has few equals in braiding landscape and sky into the marrow of her characters. Her poet’s origins are in full force as she folds in the sickening damage of fracking and pesticide-dependent agriculture, right alongside the sprouts of resistance. In this tender and capacious story, love and tragedy mingle along the river and into the world. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal
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Come visit Tabor, ND, home of beet farms, fracking, and the Red River Valley. Most of the novel's action occurs during the economic crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, and focuses on Crystal, a descendent of Ojibwe field hands and a hauler for the industrial sugar beet plant, her 18-year-old daughter Kismet, and Crystal's problematic husband, Martin. Kismet, who once toyed with being a goth, marries Gary, the troubled son of the largest beet grower in the area. She is in love with Hugo, a high school dropout, which further complicates the situation. By focusing on the Red River, which flows northward and floods annually, Erdrich tracks the state's geological and ethnographic history. Readers learn about beet farming, pesticides, super seeds, loss of wildlife, erosion of the land, oil drilling, the Indigenous community, economic downturns, and the claustrophobic yet comforting life of a tight-knit community. While the novel touches on tragedy, it also includes scenes of sheer comedic delight. No one describes a book-group meeting better than Erdrich. VERDICT Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Erdrich (The Sentence) yet again displays her storytelling skills.—Jacqueline Snider
