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Book Details · Subject Headings · Plot Summary · Table of Contents · Blurbs
The first edition hardcover was published in 1988.
The first paperback edition (ISBN 0060972459) was published in 1989.
1988 paperback edition:
Front-cover blurb:
"Her third, and finest, novel to date....In it the author captures the passions, fears, myths, and doom of a living people, and she does so with an ease that leaves the reader breathless."
The New Yorker
Inside-cover blurbs:
"One of the most exciting and suprising novelists writing in English. [Erdrich] tells of America's dispossed, her Indian forefathers, in a compassion untainted by sentimentality....Her magic lies in her great gift for displaying the extraordinary hidden depth in an ordinary humdrum and all too frequently debased life. She finds the core of gold behind the dull facade....And she has given the Chippewas of North Dakota a lasting place in fiction."
The Sunday Times (London)
"A writer of truly extraordinary gifts--imaginative power, acute sensitivity, and unpretentious stylistic grace. At 34, she is completing a cycle of work already marked as a classic."
San Francisco Chronicle
"What gives this novel its resonance is Erdrich's extraordinary ability to create not an approximation of the past but somethinng that seems like a living, breathing evoacation of it. It is a book of powerful, poetic images, in which myth and reality elide....The novel leaves behind an indelible impression."
The Guardian
"Fleur Pillager [is] one of the most haunting presences in contemporary American literature....Tracks may be the story of our time."
Los Angeles Times
"It is difficult to pinpoint what is most compelling about Louise Erdrich's fiction--the elegance of the language, her art as a storyteller or the authenticity of her Native American characters....A triumph on all counts, haunting and memorable."
Phoenix Republic
"Erdrich may soon come to be recognized as a writer possessed of greatness....[She] has invented in Nanapush a witness to the twentieth century whose authenticity seems unassailable. The tales he tells are like shadows of real stories which we can no longer hear. Simultaneously reticent and garrulous, stark and wry, boisterous and utterly sad, he is a creation of the highest imaginative caliber."
Times Literary Supplement (London)
"Louise Erdrich's gift for vivid descriptive writing is everywhere in evidence, and many of the episodes are almost blinding in their hallucinatory brilliance."
New York Review of Books
"Everyone, even the book's minor figures, are real people, brought to life by Erdrich's ability to paint a full portrait with only a few brushstrokes."
Chicago Sun Times
"Louise Erdrich's latest novel is exquisite....I did not feel as though I were reading a novel; instead I was the audience for two powerful storytellers....Nanapush and Pauline are so unique and so distinct from each other that from the first sentence, the reader recognizes each and is caught up in his or her own story."
West Coast Review of Books
"Lapidary, poetic prose....dazzling storytelling powers...powerful scences of dreamlike intensity."
New York Times
"Louise Erdrich's voice has the swell and range of an afternoon thunderstorm: she seems to move effortlessly from reverent silence to heat-lightning dazzle and intensity....She writes unflinchingly about God and love and hunger and death and vengeance--the forces that can save or devastate an entire culture. Her research seems particularly evident in Tracks, which has the quiet pull of [her] other work but feels even truer and more unerring in its arc."
Boston Globe
"Tracks is an austerely beautiful novel, another example of Erdrich's ability to evoke both the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of her Indian heritage."
Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The charm of Louise Erdrich's narratives lies in the mystery and exaggeration that imbue all legends and folk tales."
Philadelphia Inquirer
"There is no one else writing the kind of novel that Louise Erdrich does. She depicts the rural poor, and the heritage and present of the dwindling American Indians with an audacity and passion that continually surprise."
New Statesman
"Remarkable...Louise Erdrich is still in her song, and her voice is even stronger, wiser and more glorious than before."
Detroit News
"Epic-like and timeless....Even the minor characters like Father Damien come to complex life, and Fleur, Pauline and Nanapush will remain with the reader for a long time."
St. Petersburg Times
"Erdrich writes with a sure ear, in a cadence that is hers alone and yet recalls the rhythms of traditional storytelling...Erdrich is making an epic."
San Jose Mercury News
"One must reach for names like Balzac and Faulkner to suggest the scope of her three interlocking novels....[Louise Erdrich] is like one of those rumored drugs that are instantly and forever addictive."
Chicago Tribune
"It is art of the highest order to recreate a world and its people with such fidelity and power that they become part of the common memory. That is the gift of this remarkable novel and of Louise Erdrich."
Detroit Free Press
"I can't imagine a work of fiction more technically dazzling, more engrossing, more morally engaged than Tracks."
Newsday
"Tracks is a rare book. It is both a wonderful story that borders upon myth and a stylistic masterpiece...a beautiful work from a gifted writer working in her prime."
Baltimore Sun
"She draws her people with all the compassion and intelligence of an angel...There is rich music in [Tracks], lucid phrasing, line by line."
Washington Times
"Her language is dazzlingly metaphorical and lyrical, and the voices of her characters are as compelling as any you will find in contemporary fiction."
Chicago Magazine
Back-cover Blurbs:
"Even readers won over by Louise Erdrich's two earlier works (Love Medicine and The Beet Queen) may be surprised by her third novel. Tracks is a stunning and powerful book: it is by far the most impressive installment....Erdrich's lyricism gives her characters a moving and spellbinding intensity. Many readers will feel they have heard these voices speaking all of their lives."
Boston Phoenix
"Ms. Erdrich's novels, regional in the best sense, are 'about' the experience of Native Americans the way Toni Morrison's are about black people, William Faulkner's and Eudora Welty's about the South, Philip Roth's and Bernard Malamud's about the Jews. The specificity implies nothing provincial or small....Ms. Erdrich artfully sifts the miraculous through the mundane."
New York Times Book Review
"Tracks is as good as [Erdrich's] first two books, which is very good indeed....Time and again she startles the reader with a perfect image."
Minneapolis Star Tribune
1988 paperback edition:
Back-cover Blurbs: The Beet Queen
"The Beet Queen is a book of power and precision."
--Robert Bly, The New York Times Book Review
"A remarkable and luminous novel."
--The New York Times
"A delight...and memorable."
--Evan S. Connell, author, Son of the Morning Star
"A brilliant, heart-thrilling book. Scene after scene shines with the wisdom and stunning talent that mark Louise Erdrich as one of our very best writers."
--Josephine Humphreys, author, Dreams of Sleep
Back-cover Blurbs: Love Medicine
"[Louise Erdrich] seems to have come by her enormous folk wisdom instinctively, like Huckleberry Finn. She depicts the hardness of these lives with originality, authority, tenderness, and a pitiless and wild wit."
--Philip Roth
"Louise Erdrich is the rarest kind of writer, as compassionate as she is sharp-sighted, and Love Medicine is a powerful piece of work."
--Anne Tyler
"I am stunned by the power of Love Medicine...a book of masterful expression."
--Kay Boyle
"A remarkable first novel, quick with agile prose, taut speech, poetry, and power, conveying unflinchingly the funkiness, humor and great unspoken sadness of the Indian reservations."
--Peter Matthiessen
"The beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being completely devastated by its power."
--Toni Morrison
Back-cover Blurbs: Jacklight
"Reading the poems in Jacklight, one experiences the sensation of fear that an honest vision evokes. That is how we must learn things; by knowing a bit of truthful fear we may know courage, love, faith, life. That is the way I experience Erdrich's poems of revelation. She is a remarkable, remarkable writer."
--Simon Ortiz
Modified: June 02, 2008,
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