Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook (Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction)

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Summary: A scholarly compendium of literary criticism
Review: Love Medicine was Louise Erdrich's debut novel and won a National Book Critics Circle Award when it was published in 1984. A short story cycle narrated by a variety of different characters, Love Medicine chronicles the intertwined histories of Chippewa and mixed-blood families in North Dakota spanning more than fifty years and laying bare the ordeals and joys of twentieth-century Native American life. Erdrich successfully and poignantly evoked the continued relevance of homeland, humor, and storytelling with the issues of indigenous survival in the modern era. Highly recommended reading for students of contemporary Native American experience in general, and the writings of Louise Erdrich in particular, Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine: A Casebook is a scholarly compendium of literary criticism and analytical essays organized around the subjects of "Contexts: History, Culture, and Storytelling"; "Mixed Identities and Multiple Narratives"; Individual and Cultural Survival: Humor and Homecoming"; and Reading Self/Reading Others".