Louise Erdrich | Criticism

This literature criticism consists of approximately 5 pages of analysis & critique of Louise Erdrich.
This section contains 1,468 words
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Buy the Critical Review by Russell Banks

SOURCE: "Border Country," in The Nation, Vol. 243, No. 14, November 1, 1986, pp. 460-63.

In the following review, Banks asserts that The Beet Queen, in its best sections, rivals the novels of Charles Dickens in socially conscious storytelling.

The Beet Queen is a Dickensian story, an angry comedy about abandonment and survival, pluck and luck (ambition and coincidence), common sense and pretension, and wise children and foolish adults. The book is structured in an almost classical manner. It opens with a sudden, unpredictable disaster that tosses an ordered world into terrible disarray. It then follows the paths of the half-dozen affected lives through three generations of small triumphs and reversals, long digressions and quick returns, until at last, in a ceremonial event that reunites and reorders the scattered elements of the tale into symmetrical, benign relations, it circles back to where it began, with everything the same only different—which in...

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This section contains 1,468 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page)
Buy the Critical Review by Russell Banks
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Critical Review by Russell Banks from Gale. ©2005-2006 Thomson Gale, a part of the Thomson Corporation. All rights reserved.