The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich

Amazon.com
Nineteenth-century American pioneer life was introduced to thousands of young readers by Laura Ingalls Wilder's beloved Little House books. With The Birchbark House, award-winning author Louise Erdrich's first novel for young readers, this same slice of history is seen through the eyes of the spirited, 7-year-old Ojibwa girl Omakayas, or Little Frog, so named because her first step was a hop. The sole survivor of a smallpox epidemic on Spirit Island, Omakayas, then only a baby girl, was rescued by a fearless woman named Tallow and welcomed into an Ojibwa family on Lake Superior's Madeline Island, the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker. We follow Omakayas and her adopted family through a cycle of four seasons in 1847, including the winter, when a historically documented outbreak of smallpox overtook the island.
Readers will be riveted by the daily life of this Native American family, in which tanning moose hides, picking berries, and scaring crows from the cornfield are as commonplace as encounters with bear cubs and fireside ghost stories. Erdrich--a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Ojibwa--spoke to Ojibwa elders about the spirit and significance of Madeline Island, read letters from travelers, and even spent time with her own children on the island, observing their reactions to woods, stones, crayfish, bear, and deer. The author's softly hewn pencil drawings infuse life and authenticity to her poetic, exquisitely wrought narrative. Omakayas is an intense, strong, likable character to whom young readers will fully relate--from her mixed emotions about her siblings, to her discovery of her unique talents, to her devotion to her pet crow Andeg, to her budding understanding of death, life, and her role in the natural world. We look forward to reading more about this brave, intuitive girl--and wholeheartedly welcome Erdrich's future series to the canon of children's classics. (Ages 9 and older)


About the Author
Louise Erdrich was born in 1954, the oldest of seven children, and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, where her Ojibwa-French mother and German-American father taught at a Bureau of Indian Affairs School. She did not leave the region until 1972, when she entered Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. During and after college, Erdrich held a variety of jobs: She hoed sugar beets in Wahpeton; waitressed in Boston, Syracuse and elsewhere; worked in a state mental hospital in Vermont; taught poetry in prisons and schools in North Dakota; worked on a construction site; and edited The Circle, a Boston Indian Council newspaper. Jacklight, Erdrich's first book of poems, was published in 1983, followed a year later by Love Medicine, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Award, the Janet Kaufman Award from the American Institute of Arts and Letters, and other prizes. Love Medicine eventually became the first novel in a remarkable series that would include The Beet Queen (1986), Tracks (1988), The Bingo Palace (1994), Tales of Burning Love (1996) and The Antelope Wife (1998). In addition to these novels, Erdrich's publications include a collaborative novel, The Crown of Columbus (1991, written with Michael Dorris), and another book of poetry Baptism of Desire (1989). She has written of art, infancy, and the natural world in her first work of nonfiction, The Blue Jay's Dance (1995).

 

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