CV Rick's Reviews

Birchbark House - the Real House on the Prairie

Generations of American children have grown up reading Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder. I'm in one of those generations. These stories gave us a view into settlers moving into formerly Indian territories and the hardships of breaking new lands to the plow, fighting weather, droughts, floods, and illness.  These stories are our stories of conquering the prairie West.  But there's another story that needs to be told and this story is of the Indians we died of disease and starvation and were moved off the lands so that white settlers could build farms and towns. 

Laura Ingalls Wilder told the only stories she could tell – one dimensional tales of white people in a white nation.  Louise Erdrich tells the story she is equipped to tell – one of a rich group of people living together in the Northern prairie lands.  In this story Omakayas is a young Ojibwe girl living with her family, but the characters aren't all Indian.  There's Albert LaPautre, a Frenchman who bumbles through trades and wild visions.  There's Omakayas' father who works to pay off his yearly debt to the trading post and knows how to play chess so well that he can sometimes win enough food to help his family through hard times.  There's Old Tallow, a medicine woman with a pack of angry dogs who teaches kind lessons through harsh examples.

For Omakayas and her family life is both hard and wonderful.  There's enough sadness in the book to make you cry and enough happiness to make a child play-act the parts.  The one thing I love about native storytelling is the respect shown to animals and plants that are needed to survive.  Ms. Erdrich tells of this relationship with the skill of a master storyteller.

This book is richer and more complete than Little House on the Prairie.   It's a responsible book and deserves more accolades and a greater following than that earlier work.  It's brilliant and sensitive and fun.  Everyday life never made me feel so fully.  Please let all children in your life read this beautiful book.

- CV Rick, May 2008

A Character Study, Not a Novel.

For the past five years I've finished every book I've started. Even books I don't like I finish because I want to know what makes a book succeed and what makes a book fail.  For me it's a study in the craft and I seek out what other people enjoy, what they see in the literature they read.  This book, Saturday by Ian McEwan, broke that streak.  I couldn't finish it.  I couldn't push myself through to the end. 

It's a novel that tries too hard to wrap itself in the trappings of theme and symbolism that it forgot one important element – plot. Every moment of Henry Perowne's day is described in painful detail. Every decision, every point of a squash game, every item on the shopping list.  Grueling – that's the word that I'd use to describe it. 

Sometimes I've heard people say that their favorite author could write a shopping list that'd be interesting.  It's just a saying people, it isn't true.  In fact there's a lot of stuff that people write for their own notes that the public ought not be subjected to . . . like character study notes.  Maybe Henry Perowne should've been an interesting character in a book with a plot.  Maybe he'd have been sympathetic in such a vehicle. 

This was not that vehicle.  This isn't even a novel.  It's just a long drawn-out, boring, tedious vignette.  Characterization notes. Nothing more. 

- CV Rick, May 2008

In the Mind of a Benevolent Serial Killer

As further evidence for my thesis that a full season of a television series is the perfect vehicle for the complexities of a novel, Darkly Dreaming Dexter was indeed made into the series, Dexter and kept mostly intact from book to season one.  When I found this out, I bought the book expecting a competent thriller.  What I got was much more.

Dexter Morgan works in a laboratory for the Miami Police Department.  His forensic specialty is analyzing blood splatter, which fits in with his obsessions about blood perfectly, for he is also a serial killer.  In fact that's his main occupation.  Jeff Lindsay tells this story first person, through the voice and mind of Dexter.  He doesn't consider himself human because he doesn't have human emotions, or human cares.  He's been taught to channel his alter-ego, his "Dark Passenger," to kill only those people who deserve death - those who prey on the innocent.

Everything is going great with Dexter until the victims of another serial killer show up.  These victims appeal to Dexter, the murders are perfect and the murderer is playing a game with Dexter's Dark Passenger.  It's like a siren's call and his carefully crafted control breaks down.  Can Dexter control it or maybe he's already lost control and his Dark Passenger is loose without his conscious knowledge.

It's a page turner.  Fast and gritty.  I'm glad I read it.

- CV Rick, April 2008