The Round House

Title: The Round House
Author: Louise Erdrich
Pub Date: 2012
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A 13-year-old boy tries to solve the crime of what happened to his mother on their reservation

I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into with this one, because I just read a blurb about it on the Publisher's Weekly website and of course when I saw Indian I thought 1800s, because living where I do I don't really think of reservations still being a thing now. So I was thrown a bit for a loop when I saw the date 1988 at the beginning, but after a minute of being confused I settled into it.

Overall, this is a pretty good story. It is narrated by a 13-year-old boy living on a reservation in North Dakota whose mother is brutally raped, and the ensuing fallout that results from that crime. I have to admit I did start page flipping a bit just after the middle, because it kept veering off into old legends told by the narrator's grandfather and other bits and pieces that just weren't quite holding my interest. There is an entire side plot involving the narrator and his three teenage friends, and while it's fine, it just didn't really keep me in the story. There is another plot about several of the narrator's family members that was also kind of hit or miss.

This does tell what I imagine is a fairly authentic tale of reservation life, especially in the late '80s. Crime is certainly still a major problem on reservations, and rape is distressingly common and usually unsolved. The Justice Department reported a few years ago that 1 in 3 native women are raped or sexually assaulted, compared with 1 in 5 on the national average. That's disturbing. And the laws that govern reservation land can be charitably described as byzantine. So it's a story that needs telling, to be sure. I just found this tale to be a bit all over the place at times, when maybe more of a focus on the subject at hand might have made it easier to read. But it was not unenjoyable, and I finished it in a day.