by Louisse Erdrich. Erdrich steps out of the deep river of her great Native American saga, last manifest in The Plague of Doves (2008), and into a feverish drama of a marriage and household in peril. The intensity of this exquisite, character-driven tale, its searing efficiency in encompassing the painful legacy of the Native American genocide, and its piercing insights into sex, family, and power are breathtaking. Irene America, of Ojibwe descent, hopes to complete her doctorate in history in spite of the demands of her volatile painter husband, Gil, and their three children: sons Florian, a secretive math prodigy, and gentle little Stoney, and daughter Riel, named after Louis Riel, a Metis resistance leader. Irene's subject is the nineteenth-century artist George Catlin, whose portraits of Native Americans raise disturbing questions about exploitation. As do Gil's erotic paintings of Irene, icons of violation born of his maniacal possessiveness, violent rage, and paranoia. Once Irene, who is drinking heavily, realizes that Gil is reading her diary, she begins writing entries calculated to push him to the brink. As their domestic civil war escalates, Irene remembers her mother's stories about how a soul can be captured through a shadow, a vision with profound implications in this masterfully concentrated and gripping novel of image and conquest, autonomy and love, inheritance and loss. --Booklist.
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