This book is the story of a Drum. By telling the story of the Drum, author Louise Erdrich weaves three distinct stories together. Each piece of the Drum's history details the relationship between a mother and a daughter. In each story a daughter/sister is forced to make sacrifices for her sibling(s) because her mother has made bad decisions. The first part of the story is how Faye Travers and her mother find the Drum in the course of their business of estate appraisals. The second part tells the story of how the Drum is made after a man loses his wife to adultery and his daughter to hungry wolves. The last part of the story is how the Drum is used again after Faye returns it to the Reservation it came from.

Women. Mothers. Daughters. Folklore lovers.

I love Erdrich's economy of words. She says so much with just 276 pages. Some passages are incredibly beautiful because of their lyrical qualities. It's like reading an epic poem at times. I love how the stories fit so perfectly together. You don't even realize how wonderfully it works until the end when you know all three stories and see how the mother-daughter theme repeats. Even knowing this was a theme going in, I didn't fully appreciate it until the end.

The only negative I found was I was a little slow getting into it. I fault myself for this mostly because it was such a different style than the previous books I had read.

Sit and think about my own relationship to my mother.

There are very sad parts to this book, but it ends on a happy note. After I was done I felt at peace, as if I had made the same emotional journey with the characters.

Louise Erdrich is a critically acclaimed Native American author. Her novel Love Medicine is an excellent example of post-modern literature. In that book, as in The Painted Drum she uses multiple narrators. She also moves back and forth in time. The Painted Drum, like her previous works, explores Native American themes, like the affect of alcoholism on the Reservations. She also uses Native American images like the wolf and the raven to convey her ideas.

This is a book of substance. It is beautifully written and sticks to the ribs of your soul. We all need to read those sort of books every now and then.

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Created Mar 30, 2007 at 9:18pm • Submit your own review...