Andrea Homier's Reviews > The Painted Drum

I love how Louise Erdrich writes. I always feel at home in her stories, in that I am "at home" listening to her tell a story. There's something about her style, the words she chooses and how she orders them, that is intimate and compassionate, clear-eyed and real, that makes her work some of my favorite. In that way, The Painted Drum does not disappoint.

I did appreciate this novel, but I had a hard time following the arc of the story. There are a lot of characters and almost all of them have some kind of major tragedy with which they are coping or involved in. Different sections and chapters are told from differing view points, and while it's clear that the drum is the commonality throughout, it's difficult to assess the various tragedies in the shifting contexts. Clearly they are horrific events, but what have they meant in the course of the characters' lives? Erdrich tells us, but it's hard to weigh each, as they come one after another fairly quickly. It's as if there isn't enough time and space to experience them fully. I would have liked this book to be much longer, lingering and coloring in the contexts of what these events meant. And in that way, I feel I could have more deeply understood the drum's healing power.