Donna Woodford is a doctoral candidate at Washington University and has written for a wide variety of academic journals and educational publishers. In the following essay she discusses the story as a form of love medicine.

Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine is a novel made up of several stories about the people that reside on a Chippewa reservation in North Dakota.

The stories cover three generations, fifty years, and several families, and there are eight distinct narrators. Because the stories seem so loosely related, some Critics have questioned whether the novel is truly a novel. Alan Velie suggests that it is, rather, a "collection of short stories, all of which deal with the same set of characters." Furthermore, Catherine Rainwater asserts that the novel is full of conflicting codes which lead the reader to expect one type of novel, and then frustrate that expectation by producing a very...