Tales of Burning Love nearly matches the early 1990s time frame of Erdrich's The Bingo Palace. The same snow storm traps Lipsha in both novels and provides dual directions for the events that follow.

Dot was a comic heroine in The Beet Queen, and she was amusing in Love Medicine. Her role in Tales of Burning Love is similar to that of her earlier appearances, except that she is more a rounded character and less an aggressive force. Lyman Lamartine, the Native American businessman who rescues Jack in this novel, is more slick and tough than he was in The Bingo Palace and is far removed from the sympathetic observer of his brother's decline and suicide in Love Medicine. Sister Leopolda in Tales of Burning Love is greatly transformed by the comic genre in which she appears; she is much changed from the witchlike nun in...