SOURCE: "Gambling with Their Heritage," in New York Times Book Review, January 16, 1994, p. 7.

In the following review, Thornton offers a positive appraisal of The Bingo Palace but expresses reservations about the novel's elements of magical realism.

One of the dominant motifs in the fiction of American Indian writers is the vision quest, whose goal is the integration of inner and outer being through knowledge gleaned from nature. Louise Erdrich has explored this territory in Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks, and she revisits it in her moving new novel, The Bingo Palace. Set, like the others, on the North Dakota plains, this latest book shows us a place where love, fate and chance are woven together like a braid, a world where daily life is enriched by a powerful spiritual presence.

Her story comes to us in the alternating voices of the inhabitants of the Chippewa reservation...