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I first learned of Louise Erdrich and THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE from an article in one of my parenting magazines. Plus, you can't help but fall in love with Omakayas and her family, even her bothersome brother, Pinch. Word has reached the tribe that the white settlers are making all Native Americans move west even though a treaty concerning the land was put in place years before.
Its sequel, THE GAME OF SILENCE, is just as good if not better.The story picks up three years after the small pox winter of 1847 (in THE BIRCHBARK HOUSE). What I love about THE GAME OF SILENCE and Louise Erdrich's writing is that reading historical fiction can be enjoyable. The book was compared to those of the Little House series, which I LOVE, so I quickly bought the book and read it.
Omakayas has also begun having important dreams and been feeling a strong push to go into the forest with a coal-blackened face for a four-day fast with the hope that the spirits will speak to her and give her guidance.something that she is not looking forward to doing. Omakayas's family and the rest of their Ojibwe tribe take in a tribe of friends and family members who have been displaced by the chimookomanag, or white men. This is just one of the many changes that Omakayas and her family will have to endure in this book.
The reader comes away from the book with a greater understanding of the way of life, hardships, and traditions of this Ojibwe tribe. I can't wait to start the next book in the series, THE PORCUPINE YEAR.
Louise Erdrich gives sentences, paragraphs, that take my breath away. They are filled with love and humor; you can put them down but you don't want to.
A young girl's name. A name that is a signpost that you are entering a way of life far from your own.
Omakakeyens. This book follows as she grows up in northern Minnesota, with the just released Porcupine Years as the story continues.
Her days are filled with her family, their way of life within the pattern of the seasons, a relationship to all living and growing things around them.This is the 2nd of what is now 3 books. First, Birchbark House where we first read of Omakakeyens, I think about 6 or 7 years old, and her Ojibwa family at the turn of the century.
I have all three to give my granddaughter, but not until I've read them. Her books are true treasures, deserving of all the awards they have received.
As Lillian pointed out when I asked her about what makes a good young adult novel, the most obvious difference is that the narrator -- the active, witnessing consciousness of a story's events -- is usually a child or teenager. While in all earnestness, some authors create stories that seem too didactic in seeking to compensate for the stereotypes of the past, these new books of Erdrich and Ketchum offer writing for younger readers that is enjoyable as well as challenging, and historically complex.Erdrich is the author of nine novels for adults, two collections of essays, and three collections of poetry along with two children's books and a previous young adult novel, The Birchbark House (nominated for a National Book Award in 1999), to which the new novel The Game of Silence is a sequel. I've recently read aloud to our daughter Lillian two new young adult novels with Native American themes, Louise Erdrich's The Game of Silence (HarperCollins, 2005) and Liza Ketchum's Where the Great Hawk Flies (Clarion/Houghton-Mifflin, 2005).At about Lillian's age I read James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and I strongly recall the ache I felt in response to Cooper's elegiac, grandly romantic evocation of the "noble" Chingachgook, who appeared to be in Cooper's view inseparable from the strange and sublime new American landscape. The Birchbark House and The Game of Silence are as serious in scope and as beautifully written as any reader of Erdrich's adult books would hope.As with its predecessor, the setting of The Game of Silence is a mid-nineteenth-century Ojibwe community on an island in the lake Gitchi-Igaming, eventually known as Lake Superior.
Along with Cooper's portrayal of close companionship between an immigrant frontiersman and aboriginal chieftain, I imbibed from that book a desolate, lump-in-the-throat sense of traditional Indians as an endangered species, remnants of a society too fragile to withstand the onslaught of the Europeans' well-armed civilizing force.In the popular media, depictions of Native Americans continue to wobble or careen between positive (dignified, sensitive, stoic, ecological) and negative (brutal, aloof, lethal, voracious for alcohol), yet in contemporary literature for children and young adults, the native characters (as is also true of African Americans) are now usually portrayed in far more complimentary ways. The Game of Silence by Louise Erdrich (HarperCollins, 2005); Where the Great Hawk Flies by Liza Ketchum (Clarion Books/Houghton-Mifflin, 2005).Considering the depiction of Native Americans in books, so much has changed since I was the age of our twelve-year-old daughter.In several new books for young readers, the narrative vantage point has been very decisively shifted to place native characters in the point-of-view position, in the center of events instead of serving as "colorful" parts of the scenery. The tenor and tempo of the narrator's voice is therefore different, and in a successful young adult novel the voice is convincing, evocative and flushed with personality, not an adult's idea of how younger people sound.Erdrich's young adult books are never simplistic as they explore tremendously difficult experiences, including European-borne epidemics, which decimated native communities throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. While Omakayas and her family are beginning to see the ripple effects of changes in the east, for instance in the arrival of native refugees fleeing colonial seizure of their traditional homelands and the horrific diseases that precede the settlers themselves, readers are given at least a glimpse of the complicated societies that existed prior to the coming of Europeans. It's not easy to summarize the differences between the volcanically talented Erdrich's books for adults and those for younger readers.
It's certainly noteworthy that when writing for younger readers Erdrich never resorts to a "special" tone or style, like certain adults who adopt condescending mannerisms when talking to kids. Even more so than in The Birchbark House, in The Game of Silence Erdrich incorporates Ojibwe words and phrases, deftly translating them within her English sentences and also including a wonderful glossary that also can be read through for its own delights. As an outdoorsy suburban Boy Scout, I couldn't help but see woodsman and trapper Natty Bumppo as an exemplary white ambassador to the Indians. In both books, the main character is Omakayas (or Little Frog, "because her first step is a hop"), who is idiosyncratic and multi-dimensional, like classic literary girls such as Brink's Caddie Woodlawn, Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Wilder's Laura and Mary, Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Betsy, and Alcott's March sisters in Little Women. The former are more erotic and more violent, with a fabulous flexibility about conventional definitions of "realism," and an intensely metamorphic use of language, with surges of imagery born in dreams and hallucinations.
Yet in other respects Erdrich's way of crossing the page is unmistakable, in any genre. A substantial pleasure in Erdrich's Omakayas books is their portrayal of daily life among the Ojibwe, who are related in language and in their seasonal subsistence-cycle (summertime agriculture, autumn fishing and gathering, wintertime deer hunting, and spring maple-sugaring) to the Abenaki people of "Wabaniak" or northern New England and Quebec, our own region. As described in another of her recent books, Books and Islands in Ojibwe Country (National Geographic Directions, 2003), Erdrich has been painstakingly learning her ancestral language, and the steady presence of another language in The Game of Silence changes the sound, the texture, and the perspective of the story.Another ingredient in classic literature for younger readers is illustrations, and like The Birchbark House, The Game of Silence features Erdrich's lovely pencil drawings, accompanying her image-rich prose as a visual counterpoint.
When told that it hadn't yet been published, they were dashed, and anxoius for its release. the continuing saga of omakayas and her family draws you in and keeps you close. Several of my 5th graders read the book together and immediately asked to read the sequel. I find it poetic and beautiful, and they are hooked by the story. A teacher's dream.
This is the sequel to The Birchbark House. Also like Birchbark House, this one is a charming blend of historical fiction and clear, lovingly drawn, appealing characters. Like its predecessor, it transpires in the Ojibwe tribe's mid 19th century home on one of the Great Lakes and on the family of Omakayas, the middle child of three `siblings'. (Siblings is like that because of what happened in Birchbark House). A young reader will benefit greatly from seeing the westward movement of white people through Native American eyes, and do that within the context of a most enjoyable story with endearing characters and emotionally accessible events, plus they'll get a smattering of Ojibwe language and its culture. Well worth giving to your middle school reader.
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